


Antediluvia

by zeitgeistic (faire_weather)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Aurors, Community: hd_erised, Draco’s American cousin, M/M, Magical USA, Merpeople, Mixed Hermione, Mrs Black’s Cheering Charmed retirement, Muggles fucking shit up as usual, Political Commentary, Some gory details recounted, Washington D.C., Water, a pointy monument, a sassy seahorse, matriarchal societies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-23
Updated: 2016-12-23
Packaged: 2018-09-09 19:24:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 15
Words: 56,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8909035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/faire_weather/pseuds/zeitgeistic
Summary: Everyone always forgets about the Merpeople. So did Harry until the day his, Lee’s, and Hermione’s Portkeys land at Reagan National Airport’s Arrivals dais. He’s just had to leave a job he loves and pack his entire life—literally—into his luggage. Then Malfoy and his subplots arrive, and suddenly, saving the world again, one Mermaid at a time, sounds like the perfect excuse to do something he’s always wanted.





	1. Chapter 1. Emigrant or Immigrant?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dicta_contrion](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dicta_contrion/gifts).



> This fic was a lot funnier before the US Election. Thank you to my two betas L & D, and special thanks to D for the Britpicking! All errors are my own. Thank you so much to the Mods for the two (!) extensions so I could finish this! Dicta, I tried really hard to include things you asked for and stay far away from the things you said NO to—I hope this fic feels like it was made just for you and that you enjoy reading it! Happy holidays!

**Antediluvian: (adj.) Before the Flood**

When the Portkey landed, he was still thinking about the newspaper. The front page, the blown-up, scowling photograph of his face, taken in a moment of surprise—and how could he still be surprised, after all these years? The inflammatory words; vitriolic and inciting and increasing with each publication.

After thirteen years, Harry had hoped that the speculation would have died off. He would have hoped that the unfounded accusations would have ended. He would have thought people would get on with their lives instead of trying to prevent his.

A moment later, Hermione arrived, her hair still twisting with momentum that physics hadn’t yet realised was missing. And just after her, Lee materialised, his face much calmer than it had been when Harry first asked him to come. He’d had a week to decide. And stop throwing things.

“Well,” said Hermione, bracingly. She put her hand to her stomach and leaned against the International Arrivals dais gate, her face more green than tan. They apparently didn’t stock courtesy Ill-Effects Bags for international Portkey travellers on this side of the Atlantic.

“Well,” she said again, forcing stable breaths out. She stood. “I think I would have preferred the long lines at International Security and a transatlantic flight after all.”

The wizard behind the Arrivals desk smirked and continued typing on his computer, pretending he wasn’t listening. A sign behind him had an enlarged photograph of a witch in thigh-length American flag robes, with a caption that read: Terminal M, Gate One-Seventh, Washington, DC International Airport.

“Agreed,” said Lee. “Never wanna do that again.”

“Well, you might not have to,” Harry muttered. They didn’t hear him.

Harry and Lee approached the Arrivals desk, and the wizard looked up from his computer, smiling.

“Welcome to the Magically United States. How can I help you?”

“Thanks,” said Lee. “Where’s cargo claim?”

“And currency exchange?” Hermione added.

The wizard pointed. “Go past the Starbucks with the three-tailed Mermaid, not the one with the two-tailed Mermaid—that one’s in the NoMaj section—and take a left. It’s just there. For currency exchange, you’ll want to stop by the First National Bank of Numinous People. They can exchange Magical or Non-Magical for you. It’s outside Security and through the atrium. Follow the signs for Metro until you start seeing signs for the bank. It’s disguised as a closed magazine kiosk.”

“Thanks, mate,” Lee said.

Harry nodded, and he and Hermione picked up their carry-with bags and followed Lee somewhat sluggishly towards the three-tailed Starbucks. Lee’s posture screamed exhaustion, but he gave them both a smile when they caught up. 

“They’ve got one on every corner,” he said, gesturing to the three-tailed Starbucks. “Which one are we supposed to turn at again?”

“The first, he said,” said Hermione. “It’s this one.”

They passed that Starbucks, turned, and thankfully saw a huge sign directing them to international cargo claim. Harry didn’t think he could manage the energy to keep searching if they hadn’t. He hadn’t slept in two nights. 

Hermione, probably three. The divorce hadn’t finalised until Thursday, and Harry would be surprised if she’d gotten any sleep at all that night. 

They managed to collect their entire households with only a few hours of paperwork and bureaucracy. They had to go back to the three-tailed Starbucks for Venti Mocha Lattes (extra shot, for Hermione) before they could stomach the thought of currency exchange.

The airport was about twelve miles long in Harry’s estimation. It felt like that, anyway, as they walked from Terminal M, out of Security, and towards the signs pointing to Metro. In the end, they almost missed the kiosk leading to the bank. Lee happened to spot it when he bumped into a Muggle businessman too busy staring at his mobile to watch where he was going.

“Arsehole!” Lee yelled, swiping ineffectually at the remains of his latte on his jacket. 

The businessman gave him a finger over his shoulder, not bothering to look back.

“Oh, there it is,” Lee said, as he ducked to inconspicuously siphon the latte from his clothes with his wand. There was still a faint stain.

“Brilliant,” said Harry, but there wasn’t much enthusiasm behind it. He was just so tired.

Hermione gave him a small smile. He smiled back, but it was hard to mean it when the circles beneath her eyes were so deep and purple. She should’ve been home, curled up in an ugly, hand-knitted, mauve afghan on her parents’ settee, nursing the withered emotions of a broken marriage. But she wasn’t. She was here, with him, across the fucking Atlantic, and she couldn’t go home again until Harry’s penance was paid to London’s satisfaction. 

Guilt was an emotion Harry was comfortable wearing. He just didn’t particularly like doing it. 

If Luna were here, instead of West Wherever, she would’ve reminded him that he didn’t owe anyone his guilt and, even if he did, it didn’t help them. She would have told him to plant a garden instead, and pay it forward, and a bunch of other shit that would’ve helped his heart, even if it didn’t help the world.

The bank was full of artificial light and bored tellers reading Muggle gossip magazines. The first one looked so relieved to finally have a customer that Harry almost smiled.

“Hello! How can I help you?”

“We need to exchange some British pounds and Galleons to… er, your currency,” Harry said. “I’m not sure what it is.”

“Oh, we use dollars,” she said, smiling more. “Doesn’t make any sense to have a whole ‘nother currency in such a big country.”

“Right,” said Harry. He pulled out his wallet and extracted a shrunken bag of his entire Gringotts vault and his Barclays accounts. He set it on the counter and slid it over. The teller peeked inside and her well-defined eyebrows rose quickly.

“I’ll just be one minute,” she said, standing up. “I’ll need my manager to help with this one.”

Ten minutes later, they’d decided that Harry was just going to have to open at account at the bank.

“This is quite a lot of money, Mr Potter,” the manager said, too casually. 

“I’m emigrating,” Harry said, perhaps too tersely.

“Ahh,” she said. Then, apologetically: “I’m afraid we don’t have this much cash on hand. In fact, I’m not sure we have it in the city. The best we can do right now is deposit it into an account and provide you with a debit card. It would take some days to have this much brought in.”

By Hermione’s snort, Harry guessed she’d suspected as much all along.

“Fine,” Harry said. “One less thing to carry around, I suppose.”

Both the teller and the bank manager looked so relieved that Harry wanted to smile yet again. 

They got him sorted with a new account, which took far less paperwork than the cargo, although he did have to fill in several forms for the IRS, whatever that was. Another self-important governmental agency without enough oversight, Harry assumed.

By the time they exited the airport and were staring in some confusion at the signs stating that the Metro was under repairs for severe safety concerns at present and trains would not be running between Reagan National and L’Enfant Plaza, whatever that meant, and that there was a shuttle available outside, Harry had had nearly enough. 

Hermione spoke to the station manager and returned with a hand-drawn map, on a Dunkin Donuts napkin, directing them to the shuttle, and that they should re-enter the Metro at Rosslyn and take that line into Federal Triangle, where they were to meet their American liaison, who’d expected them two hours ago. She apparently had not anticipated international cargo claim. 

Which was fair. Nothing that hellish was anticipatable.

The time was three in the afternoon, Eastern. They’d left England at two. Four hours gained Portkeying across the Atlantic. Five lost in cargo and currency exchange. Thus began Harry’s first day as an American immigrant.

Not entirely by choice.


	2. Chapter 2: Ms Jones’ Opinion of the UK

Harry, Hermione, and Lee did not end up reaching their liaison's office on Pennsylvania Avenue until after five. She gave them a very flat look when they opened the door and stepped inside, pushing her glasses on top of her greying head and setting a ballpoint pen down on the blotter with decisive movement.

“Are you the Brits?”

“Hermione Granger,” Hermione said, offering her hand. “Magical Beings and Creatures expert.”

Their liaison took it, shook it perfunctorily, and remained unimpressed. “Kennedy Jones—please refrain from commenting on my parents’ interest in assassinated political figures.” She flicked her eyes past Hermione. “Potter and Jordan, I’m assuming? Which of you are which?”

In that moment, Harry felt for the first time in the Wizarding world proper, the novel and unexpected experience of meeting someone who had no shitting idea who he was. He smiled genuinely, if tiredly.

“Lee Jordan,” Lee said, taking her hand next. “Public relations, but I also have some training in mediation, which is why I’m here.”

“I’m Harry Potter,” he said. “Chemist—entirely Muggle, no Potions.” 

There wasn’t much to add to that. His accomplishments had ended with Voldemort, and he’d kept to himself, and out of the Wizarding world entirely, for the large part of the last decade. His days were filled with science books and home experiments that didn’t end up in explosions too often anymore, more due to a shift in his primary interest—water—than a shift in his tendency for risky experimentation.

“Good,” said Jones. “Public relations will come in handy with our situation, I’m sure. We have plenty of Magical Beings experts, but they all charge exorbitant consulting fees and Britain owes us for this shitshow, anyway.” 

“I’m conversational in Gaelic Mermish,” Hermione added. “We’re hoping that will help establish trust, to end the, ah, rioting.”

“It may,” Jones said, nodding. “Can’t hurt.” She glanced at Harry. “Just NoMaj Chemistry? Why’d they send you?”

“Either because I specialise in water habitats,” Harry said, “Or they wanted me out of the country.”

Jones froze. “Are you on the terrorist watch list? We had you all checked when your Ministry gave us your names, but if you’ve hacked the system—”

“Not that I know of,” Harry said quickly. He was perhaps not awake enough for the spirit of this conversation. Maybe he should’ve kept his mouth shut. “The British Ministry just worries I might try to take over. I honestly have no idea why.”

Jones continued staring. “And would you?”

“I’ve not even done so much as write an op ed,” Harry said, tiredly. He really should’ve kept his mouth shut. Now he was going to have to deal with both countries distrusting him. “I’ll say this: My best guess is that the current administration doesn't trust anyone with my magical power level who could defeat a dark lord, no matter how little such a person might care about their oliga—I’m sorry, I mean their republic. You know how it is.”

“I’m sure,” she said. There was the briefest hint of a smile, but Harry could tell she wasn’t letting go just yet. “We still haven’t found anyone who can defeat our Congress.” 

“Actually,” Hermione interjected, shooting Harry an annoyed look, “We were under the impression that the trouble we’ve been asked to help fix was caused by former British citizens—the Scottish Merrows. Was that in error?”

“No,” Jones said. “You’re here to help with the Merrows. They’re rioting.”

Lee nodded. “And was it in error to assume they’re rioting because of living conditions?”

“That’s our best guess,” Jones confirmed. “They won’t talk to any of our ambassadors, though. We aren’t one hundred percent sure. Maybe speaking Mermish will help,” she added, nodding to Hermione.

“Well, Harry was selected because he studies water habitats in the field. He played himself down, but he’s an expert in it. We’re hoping to fix their living conditions so we can end the riots.”

“Good,” Jones said. “I heard we’re getting a Potioneer, too. I have no idea how that will help, but I’m happy to let it be your problem now. I’m up to my ass in public relations nightmares from this. It’s been a second job just keeping the Mers’ activities out of the NoMaj papers, much less our magical ones. Mr Jordan, we may end up needing your help more than ever.” 

A Potioneer. Fantastic. 

Harry hadn’t known who else the Ministry was shoving over here with him, but there was only one Potions Master in Britain they could feasibly fuck around, and it was someone Harry _really_ didn’t think he was up to dealing with just now. He’d made too big an arse of himself half a year ago on that one.

Harry forced himself to think about how lovely this city was instead, and what a nice home he could make of it. Or maybe he’d go to New York, or Miami, or… Omaha? That was supposed to be a good city, he thought.

Kennedy Jones sat back down at her desk and then gestured vaguely. Three dated, government-issue chairs popped into being. It was a lovely piece of wandless, wordless magic and even Harry was impressed by it. “Please sit.”

Jones picked up the phone and dialled a few numbers. She smiled at them, holding a finger up while she waited. “Just a moment.” 

There was silence as the three of them stared at her, and then she said, “Yes, get me Deshawn.” Another moment of silence, and then: “Deshawn, I’m going to need you to run another background check on the Brits. Especially the Potter one. He might be on the list… Yeah, that one. Oh, really? Well do it anyway, just to be sure. Looking specifically for anything suggesting coup attempts or desire—might get Profiling in, too. Yeah, thanks.”

She hung up the phone and sighed. “All right, it’s nearly six now and I’ve been here since seven this morning, so let’s make this quick, okay?” 

“Excuse me,” Hermione said. “Did you just—?”

“We don’t take any chances in this country,” Jones said, unapologetic. “Now, I’ve had my admin make some welcome packets for you, detailing the situation as it stands and the intel we have so far. Nothing under clearance yet—we’ll wait for Potter’s background check to come back before that. This is mostly information available to the Magical press, but you’ll find a few extra tidbits in there that we haven’t released yet. I’ll need a signature from each of you. Standard Federal non-disclosure. Magically binding, of course.”

She passed the folders to them, and they each took them without a word. Harry because he was too tired to care, and probably the same for the other two.

Jones continued: “We got you an Airbnb in Foggy Bottom. Just four stops up on Metro, but it’s walkable if you’re the type. About thirty minutes. Might actually be faster given all the single-tracking on Metro lately. I never know what segment they’re closing next.”

“Is the remainder of our team staying there, too?” asked Hermione.

There it was again. The thing Harry had been trying to avoid thinking about. 

“No, not enough bedrooms. We got them a similar Airbnb nearby. They’re arriving tomorrow.”

Hermione and Lee looked at each other, shrugging. They hadn’t figured it out yet, but it would be less of a problem for them anyway. Hermione and Lee hadn’t interacted with him much since leaving school, but Harry had. When he was just getting into his ‘water hobby,’ he’d fallen into a habit of stopping by Draco Malfoy’s office at Hogwarts to beg some litmus paper off him every few weeks. 

It had lasted twelve years too long.

It had lasted _even after_ Harry had said ‘fuck it completely’ to the Wizarding World and took the Secret off his house. 

Mrs Black hadn’t liked the Muggle neighbour visits once he’d cleared out the house-elf heads and other magical detritus, but she and Harry had come to… a solution some years back, so she kept her opinions to manageable rants. Harry had grown accustomed to chatting with the neighbours whenever he went out for the mail or walked to the shops. He was going to miss that.

Now, Harry bought his litmus strips off Amazon. He suspected Malfoy did the same. Harry was _sure_ he’d seen a cardboard box with the Prime logo to the side of Malfoy’s desk once.

But he didn’t like to think about that. Because then he had to think about why he’d always gone back to Malfoy for the stupid litmus paper even though Malfoy overcharged him with piteous comments about his teaching budget and blah blah blah. 

“Shall we meet you back here tomorrow morning?” asked Hermione.

“Jesus, no,” said Kennedy Jones. “I have work to do. Get settled, read over the documents I gave you, and get in contact with the other team. I’ll let you know when—if—Mr Potter’s background comes back sparkling clean and then— _if_ —I’ll brief you all on the finer points.”

She held out another piece of paper. 

“Mr Malfoy’s team’s Airbnb and house phone number,” said Jones, and then Hermione and Lee did start, their eyes going wide and their mouths falling open. Harry gave them an apologetic twist to his lips. Hermione took a deep breath and took the post-it with Malfoy’s information. 

Jones said, “Give them a call around lunch. Hopefully, they’ll be quicker with customs than y’all were.” She pushed her reading glasses back down on her nose and shooed them away. “Now go so I can get home before tomorrow.”

They made it all the way to the front steps of the building before Lee mentioned Jones’ slip into ‘y’all.’ And another half-block before they asked if he’d known it was Malfoy the whole time.

-x-

Between the three of them, and with Harry and Hermione’s experience with the Tube, they managed to navigate Metro to their stop at Foggy Bottom, then walked the five blocks to their Airbnb, the entire contents of their former homes tucked neatly into the rolling luggage and carry-with bags they lugged with them. Hermione made them stop at the Whole Foods for over-priced organic cold-pressed juice because _‘Travel weakens the immune system, Harry, and we all need our immune systems to keep from dying from Malfoy’s presence.’_

Which was a fair argument. 

What Harry was most perturbed about was the fact that they charged him five cents for a sodding bag. He could’ve shrunk and pocketed the juice if he was in the Magical world, but not here. All of his Muggle shopping totes were about five metres deep in his rolling luggage, and he couldn’t exactly sort through a 2,200 sq ft suitcase in the Whole Foods queue to find them, so he had to pay the five cents and it was the _principle of the matter_.

When they finally reached their Airbnb on F Street (NW—apparently there were four F Streets in Washington, DC) the sun was just ducking below the horizon. Lee got the key from beneath a cement frog and unlocked the front door. A blast of cold, central air hit them as soon as the door swung open and, as one, they sighed in relief. They were not accustomed to these American Augusts.

Their Airbnb was a terrace—very similar to all the other houses they’d so far seen in DC. It was the third in a line of six or seven and painted a very unassuming greige with white trim. The inside was recently updated—an open layout that looked straight to the back door, with a narrow living room in front, a dining table next, and then a large, airy kitchen in the back, hopefully with a loo tucked beneath the stairs. They headed up the stairs and found two tidy bedrooms and a single bath in the hall, with another set of stairs continuing up to the top.

By unspoken agreement, Lee got the master bedroom on the top floor. He’d brought his entire home studio of audio equipment, after all. Despite a successful career in public relations—that Harry was taking him from—he still spent his weekends volunteer commentating for the Chudley Cannons, whose budget didn’t allow for much.

Harry took the back bedroom so Hermione could have the canted bay window with the reading bench. It wasn’t entirely unselfish—he always felt more comfortable when people couldn’t look in on him. 

Harry shut the door behind him, and set his carry-with bag on the bed. For a long moment, he just stared at the wall in front of him, his mind curiously blank. He was tired. Not bodily, though even lightened luggage was heavy when it contained your whole life. 

His heart was tired. It had been thirteen years since Voldemort. Harry was thirty years old, and he’d spent the last nine years of his life living, pretty much, like a Muggle. He’d gone to University, read Chemistry, taken a Muggle job in a Muggle lab, and devoted himself to a fascination with the chemical of life.

Harry had beaten death twice. He wasn’t interested in that. He was interested in _life_. 

Water was the way to that. For a brief moment, he’d been interested in the blood magic that had let him keep his own life, but it had been, on the whole, much too creepy for him. 

Why couldn’t the Ministry see that he had no interest in their politics and games? He didn’t want to take over the Ministry. He wanted to _live_. 

His excursions to Diagon were few. A dinner there with Ron, Hermione, and perhaps Ginny once or twice a month. A supply of potions ingredients for his experiments from the Apothecary that he couldn’t find in Muggle London. A trip to the sweets shop, because Muggles failed really hard at making good chocolate. 

His day-to-day life was as _Harry Potter: Field Chemist, ordinary bloke with hipster glasses that he wore because Hermione said they made him look intellectual and Harry liked to attract intellectual dates_.

Nothing in that suggested ‘Preparing to take over the world.’

In Harry’s opinion, anyway. Which was worth very little, given he was about to spend his first night practically exiled from his own country ‘until or unless’ he could fix a problem he didn’t cause. 

Well, maybe exiled was too strong a word for it, but to Harry, it didn’t really feel too strong. He felt like he’d been pushed between a rock and a hard place, and the Minister had _known_ that from the beginning. 

The sound of the shower turning on spurred him back into life. He shook his head and bent to lay his rolling luggage flat on the floor. He didn’t feel much like unpacking—as if he _could_ unpack all of Grimmauld Place into this little bedroom—but he did need to get a few essentials. He tapped the lock with his wand and it sprung open to his magical signature. The top flipped back and Harry stepped onto the first rung of the ladder. 

The smell of the Grimmauld Place attic wafted up from his trunk as he stepped inside. He descended down through the attic and hopped out onto the top floor hallway, then took the stairs down to his bedroom, where he took out a few changes of clothes. It was really just a dozen pairs of pants, three identical dark green t-shirts and two identical pairs of jeans. 

This was a trick he’d picked up from Hermione, who’d worn red every single day of her life for the past five years. It was a good choice for her complexion, Harry had always thought. Uniforms made getting dressed loads easier. It was great for Harry, who really had no intention of ever getting up on fashion, but didn’t particularly want to look like Oliver Twist, either. 

After grabbing his clothes and toiletries, he went down to the ground floor of his old house and tapped on Mrs Black’s frame. Her curtains swung open and she glared out at him.

“What do you want? I was napping.” 

“We’re here,” Harry said, raising an eyebrow. Mrs Black never slept. “You want to come out or are you going to stay locked up in my luggage the whole time?”

“Hmph,” she said, wrinkling her already wrinkled nose in distaste. 

“It’s going to be dark again when I shut the trunk,” Harry reminded her. “And boring. There’s an art museum here we could pop over to later this week...”

“Fine,” she said, suspiciously quickly. 

Harry hid his smirk as he lifted her frame from the wall and tucked it carefully under his arm, leaving just the curtains behind. His errands thus done, he set his clothes to follow him and climbed back up the ladder and out of his suitcase.

Hermione was waiting for him in his room when he came out. She took one look at the portrait and lifted her eyebrows. Harry shrugged. He couldn’t very well leave her all alone down there. She had been frightfully lonely since Kreacher’s death.

Harry set her portrait on the dresser with a good view of the room and back window. 

“Hello, Mrs Black,” said Hermione.

Mrs Black glared at Hermione until Harry prodded her oil-based arm with his finger. 

“Good afternoon to you, Mrs Weasley, you hideous troll,” Mrs Black said stiffly. “You’re looking well.”

Hermione’s face tightened. “It’s Granger again, Mrs Black.”

Mrs Black pretended not to be interested. “Oh? Finally rid yourself of that lowborn scoundrel? Did he ask you to work? ... _Ohh_ … I see. Did he not live up to his vulgar promises in the marriage bed—?”

Hermione’s face turned as red as her pantsuit. “It was my fault,” she admitted, uncharacteristically quiet.

Mrs Black, Slytherin as she had once been, noticed the wound immediately. Given the industrial strength Cheering Charm that had been applied to her canvas twelve years ago, she only prodded at it a bit. 

“It’s your Muggle blood, dear. You can’t be too hard on yourself.”

Hermione laughed, startled. “Thank you, Mrs Black. You always say… things. And it helps. Sometimes.”

Mrs Black looked disturbed. “Yes, well. Perhaps apply some cosmetic charms and try again.” 

Mrs Black turned away from the frame, retreating to her painted desk and re-reading the same correspondence she’d been reading when she was painted. Harry had no idea who it was from or what it said, but it always softened the sharp frown lines on her face.

He turned back to Hermione just as Lee, freshly showered, poked his head in. “ _Y’all_ ready for dinner?” he asked innocently. Then, “Hey, Mrs Black. You’re looking freshly varnished.”

“I am.”

“Oh!” said Hermione, standing up and running to her room. 

She returned a moment later with her mobile, tapping rapidly on the screen. “The owners left a list of helpful things for tourists on the icebox. I put the list in my mobile so we could get directions. There’s a few pubs nearby.”

“Whatever’s closest,” said Lee. “I’m knackered.”

“Same,” said Harry. 

Hermione tapped some more, bottom lip between her teeth. “All right, let’s try this place. It’s back near the Tube. Should be much quicker without our bags.”

-x-

With the sun down and no bags to carry, it was a much more pleasant walk. There were plenty of Muggles out, walking to and from the station, going to shops and restaurants and bars. It was nice to be among people and not have those people gawking at him.

They got a table outside on the patio. Harry wasn’t the only one who sighed in relief when they sat down. 

“Anything to drink besides water?” asked their waitress.

“Ale, for the love of Mer—God,” Lee said.

“What kind?” she asked, smiling at him. 

Lee eyed her, his lips turning up. “What’ve you got?”

Harry could see the very moment that the waitress decided she’d be giving Lee her phone number. Her hip jutted out just a bit more as she shifted her weight and rattled off the draft list. None of them were familiar to Harry until the end, when she said,

“And Guinness, and…” she consulted her tablet, “Smith-wicks.”

“Smitticks,” Lee corrected gently. 

“Smiddicks,” she repeated, blushing through her smile. 

“I’ll have that,” Lee said.

“Same,” said Harry.

“Same,” said Hermione.

She rushed off to get their drinks, and Harry and Hermione turned to Lee with matching smirks. 

“ _Smitticks_ ,” Hermione repeated in a sultry, melodramatic voice, her eyelashes fluttering. “I’ll have the Smiiiitticks.” 

“Oh, fuck off,” said Lee, grinning. He tossed back his dreads rakishly. “She’s pretty.”

“Very,” Hermione agreed, suddenly staring hard at her menu.

Harry squeezed her thigh beneath the table and she shot him a grateful look before returning to the menu. She cleared her throat. 

“Appetiser?” she asked. She scrunched her eyebrows. “Or, er… small plate?”

“Several,” agreed Lee. “I could eat a hippogriff. What about these posh little hamburgers?”

“I was going to get a burger for mains,” Harry said.

“So?” said Lee.

“You have to eat more than red meat,” Hermione said without looking up. “Your immune system needs vegetables.”

“Okay, the posh little burgers with tomato. And the chicken wings,” Lee amended.

Harry snorted.

“The chicken wings and the cobb lettuce wraps,” Hermione corrected.

The boys rolled their eyes, but agreed, and when their waitress—Madison—returned with the ales, they put in their full orders. She left, giving Lee an extra smile. Harry leant back in his wrought iron chair and watched the people go past. The night was cooling off quickly, but the day’s heat lingered in the pavement, giving off a wistful sort of warmth.

When the chicken wings arrived, Lee was disturbed to find that some were not actually from the wing area of a chicken. He held a tiny drumstick up, frowning. “This is a leg.”

“It’s a Muggle thing to call all the little bits tossed in a sauce ‘wings,’” said Hermione. 

“But you can’t fly with legs,” Lee insisted. “Why would you call it a wing?”

“Bats fly with their front legs,” Hermione said. 

“Are these bat wings?” said Lee, suddenly more interested. “I haven’t had those in ages. I didn’t think Muggles ate them. Look kinda big, though.”

“They’re chicken,” Harry assured him, laughing.

Lee shrugged and bit into it, chewing thoughtfully. Harry took the opportunity to test his water with a quick, inconspicuous charm. The results didn’t shock him, but he did curl his lip a bit. Always so much chlorine! 

He looked over his shoulder and then dumped out all three of their glasses in the shrubs, inconspicuously refilling them with _Aguamenti_ , which purified the water it sourced from local taps, watersheds, rivers, or whatever else was nearby.

“Chlorine or fluoride?” asked Hermione, eyebrow raised.

“Both, but the chlorine was rather high,” Harry said. “Makes you wonder what diseased thing keeps getting into their water that they have to dump so much bleach into it.”

“And it all gets washed into the lakes and rivers at the end,” Hermione said, sighing. She’d heard Harry’s rants a hundred times.

“Yep,” said Harry, grimacing. Contaminated water offended him.

The United States (Magical or not) wasn’t any worse on the environment than Britain, but it was larger with more _environment_ to fuck up. 

And it was where the protests began, of course. Which was ostensibly why they were here.

Their food arrived then and Lee took a few moments to overdo some London slang to keep Madison titillated, but when she’d left again, Harry erected a _Muffliato_.

“Listen,” Harry said. “I just want to say thanks for coming with me.”

“Mate, it’s fine,” said Lee.

“Really, Harry,” Hermione agreed.

“I know, I just… I really appreciate it. If you’d both said no, I would’ve had to come by myself, with whoever Malfoy brings… if he’s able to get anyone to come with him, that is. And it would have really sucked. I asked you to make a life-changing decision in just a couple days, and it could be a long time before we get to go home, so… so thanks.”

Hermione looked sad. “Harry, I know you said you were ‘emigrating’ but you know that doesn’t have to be true. We _can_ solve this.”

Harry grimaced. “Can we? They sent me here because I was the only expert on water with ties to the Wizarding world; they didn’t have a plan or even the _beginnings_ of one. They just had to _look_ like they were helping out the Americans and they wanted me gone for a while. Be honest: you can’t actually think Murdoch expects us to _fix_ this. If we could, someone would’ve done it already.”

Lee and Hermione looked at one another. Hermione nervously pushed her hair behind one brown ear. She cleared her throat. “I think we can do it, Harry. Magic can do a lot that Muggles can’t.”

Lee nodded. “Or we’ll die here trying. Anyway, not a lot for me back home anymore, ‘cept George, but he’s busy with the kids and all. It’s a new adventure.”

Unspoken in there was the fact that Lee’s grandparents, who’d raised him, had died shortly after the war, leaving him an inheritance and an empty, desolate house in the Lake District—but no family to share it with.

“Plus, there’s lots more opportunity here,” Lee continued. “More cities I could live in, more places I could work, more women I could date.”

“Riiight,” Hermione said, slowly. She took a long drink from her beer and said, “Harry, just stop it. I know you’re dying to castigate yourself over this, but Lee and I made a choice. The circumstances aren’t ideal, but it is an opportunity for us both. I don’t even _want_ to be in England right now with the… you know, _that_ thing. Plus, most of the magical beings experts are here in the US; I can network all day. And Lee’s being stifled in England; there’s just not enough good work for him there. If we can pull off something like this, then our careers will skyrocket—”

“What other kinds of rockets are there?” Lee asked. Hermione ignored him.

“But if it goes wrong,” Harry insisted, “then I’m stuck here forever… and likely you both are, too.”

Hermione narrowed her eyes. “Let the Ministry try it. They’ll have an international scandal on their hands and I, for one, won’t be blamed for something I didn’t even do.” She gave him a pointed look. 

He got the message. 

But she didn’t have the whole story, and he wasn’t about to let her in on it now.


	3. Chapter 3: Bring Granger & Beer

After dinner, they grabbed some groceries (i.e., beer and crisps) from the Whole Foods and walked back to their terrace. Lee had indeed left with Madison’s phone number—and her agreement to go out to dinner with him on the weekend. Then Hermione had remembered that they were supposed to tip in the US, and Lee ran back to give her more cash than was probably customary.

At home, Hermione turned on the telly and expertly navigated to the Netflix, that her parents had and which Harry had always secretly wanted to try, but for which he hadn’t ever managed to get the sodding internet to work in Grimmauld Place. There was something in the ancient wards slithering through its walls that kept such advanced Muggleness out. 

At least he’d got the electricity to work.

He brought Mrs Black’s portrait down and propped her against the coffee table so she could watch the last season of _The Sopranos_ with Hermione. Her commentary was… typical.

Harry retreated to the kitchen for a beer and found Lee there, setting up the new laptop computer he’d bought when he agreed to come with Harry to, as Lee put it, ‘Magic in Muggle-land.’ American witches and wizards were almost completely integrated with Muggle society. They had shops and places that only Magical folk could see, of course, but they were so intermixed within the rest of the city as to be one with it. There wasn’t anything similar to a Diagon Alley here or anywhere else in the US. And the Magical people used the internet daily. Lee was not one to be a late adopter, so therefore, he would learn to use the internet.

Harry grabbed two beers and sat down across from him. “On Reddit yet?” he asked.

Lee glanced up at him, realised it was some Muggle internet thing, and primly said, “Soon.”

Harry popped the beers open and slid the second one to Lee. “Does this city remind you of London at all?”

The distinct, horrifying sound of a modem began from Lee’s computer. Harry stared at him. Was he trying to use dial-up?

Lee looked at him, eyebrows raised. “No.”

“Yeah, me neither,” Harry said, sipping his beer. “I don’t know how I feel about that.”

“The Tube kinda sucks,” Lee offered.

Harry nodded thoughtfully. “Mhm, but the monuments are nice. The pointy one, anyway. I guess I haven’t seen any of the others.”

“Yeah, I like the pointy one,” Lee agreed. He looked up again. “Why are we talking about this?”

“I dunno,” said Harry. “You said this was an adventure. I was just thinking it’s been awhile since I was adventurous.”

Lee scoffed, and shook his dreadlocks back off his forehead. “Yeah right. You were collecting samples in a deep-sea dive two months ago. You’re just getting old.”

“I am not—!”

The modem failed to establish a connection. It started over. Lee scowled down at the laptop. “I thought this was supposed to be easy.”

“Er, I think it needs to be connected to a phone line for dial-up,” said Harry, over the squeal.

“Is that a modem?” Hermione called, aghast, from the other room. “Lee, use WiFi for heaven’s sake!”

“Where is it?” he called back. 

“It’s already there!” she said. “Just log in. The password’s on the icebox.”

“Mr Weasley said this was the best way to find the internet,” Lee muttered, but he did get up and grab a slip of paper from the icebox. He returned and passed it to Harry. “Can you just—?”

Harry laughed. “Yeah, mate, slide it over here.” 

He got Lee logged in and showed him how to browse, then left him to it. Lee had immediately Googled _‘Where is Red It, please?’_ and Harry had decided he didn’t want any part of what came next.

His mobile buzzed and he looked down to find Ron’s name on the screen. He waited to read it. Probably not a text he should take with Hermione in the room. He should go to bed soon anyway.

Mrs Black wanted to stay down to finish watching that episode with Hermione (‘As if I want to spend the evening staring at your luggage and listening to your sniffling, Mr Potter!’), so he went upstairs and got ready for bed alone. Which was probably for the best anyway since Mrs Black was worse than a mirror with her snippy comments about his appearance.

Harry slid his thumb across the screen and read Ron’s message:

> _Hey mate. You in USA yet? How’s Hermione?_

Harry grimaced. Not at talking to Ron, who he was already starting to miss, even though he’d only seen him once or twice a month for the last several years, but because he really didn’t want to talk about Hermione with him. He felt guilty enough as it was for not being able to be there, physically, for his mate only three days after his divorce.

> _We’re here. Hermione’s ok. How are YOU??_

The response took a few minutes to come this time. Harry had already stripped down to his pants and brushed his teeth when it arrived.

>   
>  _I’m ok. Staying with George for a while._   
>  _Gotta go. On call tonight. Just got an alert._   
> 

Harry tossed his phone aside and fell back against his bed. It didn’t feel right, and he missed his bed at Grimmauld Place.

But there was nothing saying he couldn’t sleep down there. He got up, opened his luggage again, and stepped inside. 

Grimmauld Place already felt deserted, but it was still home. And the privacy gave him the opportunity for a nice wank, which was never something to scoff at. He’d been on edge for a week, which was about as long as the British Ministry of Magic had given him to get his affairs in order and get to the US. The wank served to unwind him a bit. 

With Malfoy arriving in the morning, Harry needed it.

And bugger it all, he shouldn’t have thought of Malfoy while he was wanking. 

Harry realised his mistake too late; already predictions of what Malfoy’s naked body looked like were swimming in his head. Malfoy elegantly bent over a cauldron, steam reddening his cheeks. Malfoy getting too hot and removing his lab robes. Malfoy rolling up his sleeves, showing off his colourfully defiant sleeve tattoo, wiping the sweat from his brow, turning to Harry and overcharging him for litmus strips and then unbuttoning his shirt and trousers, his cock springing free—

Which had _never happened_ —

But Harry didn’t care. He wanked to it anyway. He thought of pressing Malfoy back against the dungeon walls, the cool stone sending gooseflesh up his sides and legs, sinking to his knees and taking Malfoy’s prick between his lips…

He came within seconds, and lay staring up at the white ceiling with his hand still loosely fisted around his cock, come drying on his stomach. He felt, vaguely, disappointed in himself. Not for wanking to Malfoy, per se, but for wanking to Malfoy _again_ after all this time. He hadn’t wanked to Malfoy in at least three months. He’d thought he was over that weird, self-destructive habit.

He supposed not. Harry waved his hand to clean himself up. 

Downstairs, Mrs Black’s voice screeched loud enough to carry all the way into his trunk: “How dare you! How _dare_ you, you vile, filthy, moronic Muggles! That cannot be the end of this photo-serial! It is poor storytelling! Ms Granger, did that suspicious Muggle kill that Muggle or not?!” 

_They must have finished the last episode,_ Harry thought. 

He flicked his wand at the lights and burrowed under the covers. Hermione could coach Mrs Black through the emotional meltdown of the _Sopranos_ finale.

-x-

At around nine the next morning, Harry woke with the Trelawney-certainty that Malfoy was at that very moment Portkeying into the Magically United States. This wasn’t anything he could prove—in fact, it was probably complete bullshit rendered from his wank the night before making him feel more ‘connected’ to Malfoy—but it gave him something to focus on as he stumbled downstairs and tried to find a fucking kettle, of which there were fucking none, and Merlin’s fucking arsehole, how the fuck did Americans make tea for God’s sake—

“Use the Keurig,” Hermione said from the breakfast bar, not looking up from her iPad, upon which she was reading the _Washington Owl Post_.

“What in Dumbledore’s name is a Keurig,” Harry growled. 

Hermione swiped to the next page in her newspaper. “Makes tea and coffee. Stick a pod in, put a cup underneath, press the button.”

She was being distant and bossy. She always did that when she was upset. It was Day Four of her divorce. 

He bit his lip, feeling like his guts had been ripped out again, just like they had the day she and Ron first told him they were going to seek a divorce and then the reason why.

Harry managed to get his cup in the right spot after a terrifying moment of coffee pouring onto the countertops—there were no tea pods—and joined Hermione with a half cup of coffee as black and tarry as Voldemort’s soul. Just how he liked it, if he couldn’t have tea.

He watched Hermione scroll through her newspaper for a while, sipping his coffee and trying to remember how to be human.

“The pod thing disappeared into the machine,” Harry observed. 

The best thing to do when Hermione was upset was let her work through it on her own. She never trusted anyone else to do as good a job, and she was probably right. 

“Yes, you empty it once a week or so.”

“Into the bin?” he asked. Hermione nodded. Harry sipped his coffee. “Which then goes into the landfills, of course.”

Hermione finally looked up from her tablet. Her eyes narrowed. “I see where you’re going with this and I can’t believe I never realised it before. How wasteful! When a French press is just as easy!”

“Chemicals always leach and get into the water eventually,” Harry added, casually taking another sip. Getting her worked up sometimes helped to speed things along, too.

“Then Merkids choke on it, right?” said Lee, coming up behind them. 

He brought in Mrs Black’s portrait and propped it on the counter so she could complain about the Muggle appliances, then he turned to study the Keurig intently, looking underneath to where the coffee came out and flipping up the lid to see where the water went.

“Plastics degrade under heat,” Harry added. “Which contaminates the water. Morning, Mrs Black.”

“Good morning, half-blood, Mudblood, and whatever you are, Mr Jordan.”

Harry glared at Mrs Black. She turned her nose to the side.

“About seven-twelfths blood, I suspect,” said Lee, still trying to figure out the coffee. Harry, uncharitably, said nothing. They all had to learn Muggle life for themselves, and he was still bitter about there not being a kettle.

Hermione had returned to her digital newspaper but bit out a ‘Good morning, Mrs Black,’ in reply. Lee managed to get the Keurig working faster than Harry, and all of his coffee made it into the cup. He brought it over and took the last stool at the bar, looking quite refreshed indeed.

“You didn’t say you were a morning person,” Harry said.

“Didn’t want to scare you off,” Lee admitted. “Not when I could go on such a grand adventure!”

“Speaking of grand adventures,” said Hermione. “Do you know, Harry, who Malfoy’s bringing with him?”

Harry shrugged. “Whoever was unlucky enough to get exiled with him, I suspect.”

Hermione frowned. “I don’t think anyone was. Minister Murdoch is being surprisingly circumspect about the whole project, all things considered.”

Harry frowned. “Underhanded, you mean?” he said, thinking back to the not-ultimatum he’d been issued by Minister Murdoch—a man he’d never even met, or indeed, heard of before being summarily summoned to his office last week. Harry hadn’t even known that Shacklebolt retired. _That_ was how out of touch he was with Magical politics. And yet, Murdoch had still insinuated Harry was just the other side of a coup.

Lee laughed. “That goes without saying.”

“Well, Malfoy has more on the line than you do, Harry,” Hermione continued. “I bet he’ll be very keen to see this is done right.”

Harry narrowed his eyes. “What more could there be than, ‘Oh by the way, Mr Potter, if you fail to solve this problem, you will find your return to England to be quite the enterprise.’ Plus that awful fake exposé he had written on me.”

And also the other part that he refused to share: _‘Your friends, also, will find employment difficult to maintain, Mr Potter. Mrs Granger-Weasley is due for promotion soon, is she not? And I have heard that Auror Weasley is next in line for Deputy Head Auror.’_

Hermione and Lee seemed to both growl, low in their throats. “That slimy fucker,” Lee said. “How did he get elected? His entire campaign was ridiculous! Lies, sentences that didn’t make sense, contradictions, and the most obnoxiously bombastic attitude I’ve ever seen!”

Harry didn’t know. He certainly hadn’t voted for him, or, indeed, voted at all. 

“He can’t do anything like that,” Hermione said, reasonably. “Not legally, anyway. _And_ the people wouldn’t allow it. He’s bluffing you because he’s scared of what it’ll look like if he can’t get the Mer crisis solved. Now, Malfoy on the other hand... Not too many would stick their noses out for him.”

Hermione sipped her pod-coffee, and continued: 

“I rang Andromeda this morning and she told me Malfoy had to bring his Mum with him, and they were putting all of their properties in escrow and freezing all but his Hogwarts stipend account and his mother’s trust fund left over from her dowry. They only get their property back if we solve the problem. But Andromeda said it’s not the money—it’s the lack of ever being able to access the Malfoy family plots again. Apparently, there’s a lot of memory magic in the Malfoy family. The memories of their dead can be accessed by touching their tombs.”

Harry curled his lip. He hated governments. “He’d bring the very best then.”

“We’ll find out today,” Lee said. “Amazingly, I found actual, real information on the major Mer tribes of North America from the Google. I’ve got some ideas on what we might expect from them for demands, but I want all of us to read these culture briefs before we approach them.”

They settled in for a working morning. Hermione somehow managed to make some flapjacks and French toast show up at their front door by tapping on her mobile screen, which was bloody genius. It was a long morning, but Harry had the Keurig down now, and by the time they surfaced for lunch, he was six cups in and his stomach was growling.

His mobile vibrated. He glanced at the screen.

> _Potter, we’re here. 2450 I St NW. Bring food, alcohol, and Granger. -DM_

Harry smiled, and hated himself for it. 


	4. Chapter 4: Questionable Gentlemen

“Do you think Malfoy’s Airbnb is nicer?” Lee asked, as they waited for someone to answer the door.

“It does have a nice porch,” Hermione observed, tucking an errant curl behind her ear. There was even a porch swing. And there were three decorative tin stars tacked to the wall, all in a row. It was homey.

_Their_ Airbnb, on the other hand, just had a stoop in the front, but there was a bit of garden in the back with a dining set and some shade on the deck, so he couldn’t complain.

“Do you think they have a kettle?” Harry asked. This was obviously the more important question.

Just then, the door opened, and there was Malfoy, giving all three of them a flat stare. “It does have a kettle, yes, Potter, but it’s electric,” said Malfoy. His eyes cut sideways. “Hello Granger, Jordan.”

“Hey, man,” said Lee, stepping inside as if he came over to Malfoy’s all the time. 

Malfoy’s eyes followed him narrowly, then snapped back to Harry. “Did you bring alcohol and food? I suspect we’ll need both.”

Hermione held up a case of Sam Adams and Harry held up a bag of Thai. Malfoy stepped aside, and they were allowed to follow Lee in.

Both Harry and Hermione were desperately curious to see who Malfoy had brought with him, but the living room was empty, save for Malfoy. They heard Lee’s laughter trailing in from the kitchen and headed that way, ostensibly to set down the food and drinks.

It was at that moment that they rounded the corner and were met by the sight of Lee fist bumping and one-arm-hugging Blaise Zabini.

“Mate, how’d Malfoy talk you into this?” Lee was asking, a laugh in his voice. “I thought for sure I’d never see you set foot outside Christendom.”

Zabini was smirking as he brought a can of Guinness to his lips. “Draco’s the only consistent man in my life who hasn’t died under odd circumstances,” he said, shrugging. “It has to mean _something_ , I suppose.”

Harry looked at Draco in horror. Malfoy shrugged. “It’s true, I suppose.”

“And who else did you bring?” asked Hermione.

“Me,” came a clear voice behind them. 

They turned to find a friendly face in Padma Patil, and Harry and Hermione both let out sighs of relief that they hadn’t realised they were holding in.

“Padma!” Hermione said, happily. “I didn’t expect to see you!”

Harry eyed Hermione suspiciously. She was hardly ever that exuberant about anything these days.

“No, I suppose not,” said Padma. “But Draco’s the co-owner of my potions research lab and he said the money was coming over here and that if I didn’t want to come up with half the capital to buy him out, so was I.” She shrugged. “I like to travel. There are worse people to travel with than these two idiots.”

“Miss Patil, I beg your pardon,” came one additional voice. Harry stiffened.

“These two questionable gentlemen,” Padma corrected without missing a blink.

“That will do,” said Narcissa, nodding. 

“Mrs Malfoy,” said Harry, holding out his hand. “I heard you were coming with Mal—er, Draco. I brought someone with me you might be interested in speaking to.” 

He reached into his pocket and brought out Mrs Black’s shrunken frame. “She has an industrial strength Cheering Charm on her,” he added, and Narcissa’s face brightened infinitesimally. 

“Oh, Auntie, hello,” said Narcissa. “How are you?”

“Narcissa, my dear!” said Mrs Black. “Quite well, thank you. Mr Potter keeps me very well varnished, and if I may… it might be time to have your portrait done as well, dear. They can’t paint _all_ the wrinkles out, you know.” Mrs Black finished with a wink.

Narcissa’s expression didn’t change at all. “Why, I had it done three years ago, Auntie. I’m quite pleased with the results and I do so hope our portraits can hang together one day so that we may while away our days chatting. I daresay I won’t be difficult to look at for any length of time.” She smiled.

Harry pocketed Mrs Black before she could reply, feeling a little awkward. “She told me you were her favourite.”

“I was, Mr Potter,” said Narcissa, darkly.

“Can we get to the important parts?” Malfoy asked loudly. 

They, duly, gave him their attention. 

“The part where we have to save the fucking sea-world for fucking fish people so we can all go home again?”

“Draco, darling,” Narcissa chided.

“I even had to bring my mother,” he continued, hands extended towards her like a product model on a Muggle telly show. “No one’s mother should be forced to travel to the United States.”

“I intend to meet a nice congressman and have him put forward legislation I compose in my own favour,” Narcissa explained, unconcerned. “Or perhaps draft some myself. One makes the best of any situation, doesn’t one?”

“Mate, we’re gonna talk to the Mers,” Lee said, rolling his eyes. “Untwist your knickers.”

“We should develop a strategy, though,” Blaise added. “I should like to meet with the politicians myself and see what cards we have to play. Narcissa, perhaps we could visit together.” 

Narcissa smiled. 

“Yes, exactly. That’s why I told Potter and his merry band to come over,” Draco said, rolling his own eyes. “Granger, pop those beers open and Potter, I will smother you in your sleep if you don’t put food on this table right now. We had a hell of a Portkey. It’s hurricane season in the Atlantic, apparently.”

“How will you get to me in my sleep?” asked Harry with new interest. He was ignored.

“I’m still a little green,” Padma confirmed to Hermione. “I think we hit Hurricane Kyle a few hundred miles east of Washington.”

“I despise that name,” Malfoy muttered.

“You really should send a letter to your cousin while you’re here, darling,” Narcissa said. “Your father would’ve wanted you to.”

Malfoy curled his lip. “Mother, Father didn’t _like_ the American Malfoys.” Under his breath, he added, “Besides, they _text_ here.”

Narcissa was undaunted. “Nevertheless, it’s good politics. And a little politicking never hurts.”

Harry was busy watching the back-and-forth, feeling a strange, out-of-body fascination in the interactions between Malfoy and Lee, Malfoy and Blaise, Malfoy and his mother, Malfoy and pretty much anyone. He was not… quite like this whenever Harry had visited him at Hogwarts.

“Potter!” Malfoy snapped. “Food. Table. Go.”

Harry jumped up and dashed over to the cabinets to find some plates and bowls. Lee came over to help, giving him a wry look as he pulled open drawers looking for the silverware. They had the table set and the food out in short order. To Harry’s infinite surprise, Malfoy had uncorked a bottle of red and poured a glass for his mother in the interim, before offering Hermione a glass with a quirked eyebrow. It was much too difficult for him to actually _ask_ her if she wanted some, apparently, but she did, so she nodded and that was that.

When everyone had a plate of food, including Mrs Malfoy who was studying her noodles with some degree of intensity, Malfoy began:

“So we’re here because the British government is paranoid and useless.” 

Hermione rolled her eyes, Harry bit back a snort, and Padma checked her watch. 

“They’re afraid of me because I teach poisons, they’re afraid of my mother because she controlled a not-insignificant portion of the economy, they’re afraid of Granger because she’s not an idiot, and they’re afraid of Potter because… actually, Potter, why is Murdoch afraid of you? You’re hardly a threat.”

Harry shrugged. “Just wanted to round things out, I suppose.”

“Hmm,” said Malfoy, unimpressed. 

“About that strategy,” Hermione said. “Did Ms Jones show you lot the confidential bits yet?”

“No,” Malfoy said, now glaring at Harry. “She informed us we’d have to wait for Potter’s background check to come back.”

Harry shrugged. “The life of a suspicious person. You should see the trouble Lee has getting a cab.”

Lee scowled. “They pass me on purpose. Arsehole Muggles.” 

“So it stands to reason,” Padma cut in, “that we should find out what they want first. Ms Jones will tell us once Harry’s confirmed.”

“They want clean water,” Harry said, rolling his eyes. “But you’d think they could ask for that without, you know, trying to drown a Muggle kayaker. We’ll have to make some water purifying potions and dump a whole vat in the bay.”

Lee and Malfoy both wore dour looks. Narcissa finally took a cautious, if elegant, bite of her noodles. 

“Yeah, according to the British government,” said Lee. “We can’t just _assume_. Mediation never works when you assume you know what the other party wants.”

“He’s right,” said Hermione. “And they deserve to be negotiated _with_ , not _at_.”

“There’s tonnes of tribes,” Harry said. “We’ll have to go all over the sodding country, which is probably as big as Russia, to meet with them all.”

“We can start with the Chesapeake Merrows,” said Hermione, ignoring his whine. “Since they were the ones who rioted.”

Harry sighed, remembering McGonagall when she was in high bluster. Scots were not easy to negotiate with. He didn’t anticipate Scottish emigrant Merpeople to be, either. “So what can we do until then?”

_“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles,”_ Narcissa recited. 

Harry raised his eyebrows. Hermione, Lee, and Padma looked insulted. 

“ _The Art of War_ , Mother? Really?” said Malfoy. 

“Are you not fighting to return home, darling?” said Narcissa, carefully settling a new wrap of noodles around her fork. “To win, you must defeat your enemy. To defeat your enemy, you must know your enemy.”

There was a moment of thoughtful silence. Yet, Harry couldn’t not ask the question: “But which one is our enemy? The Mers… or the Ministry?”

Grimaces settled on all the faces around the table. Even Hermione looked uncomfortable. 

“We need to research these Mers so we can liaise with them,” Padma said, finally.

“I guess we’re back to the Google, then,” said Lee, finally. “And I, for one, am appalled and astounded by how much accurate information on magic is available in it.”

“Just wait until you find the Magic forums,” Padma said. 

That started an entirely different conversation, and Harry was swept along with it. He had several too many drinks, and felt his cheeks grow warm from that and laughter, and for a while, he didn’t have to think about the fact that he missed Ron, that his entire house was still packed away in his luggage, that he’d had to leave a job he loved. He ate his Thai food and laughed at Blaise’s stories of life on the Continent, and let himself dissolve into a disgusting mess whenever Draco forgot himself long enough to smile at him like he used to. 

It was a good night for all of them, and one thing was certain: America was way less shitty than he’d thought it would be. At least, with Malfoy here.

-x-


	5. Chapter 5: The Mer Chieftess

Harry’s background check came back acceptable a few days later, and Kennedy Jones rang to tell him so. 

“I want all of you in here at three today for a briefing. I’ve only got 30 minutes so make sure you’re on time this time. The Blue and Orange lines are single-tracking again. Take an Uber.”

They ended up needing two Ubers once they figured out what one was. Malfoy wasn’t pleased, but when was he ever? When they got out on Pennsylvania Avenue (somehow without paying, apparently it went through Harry’s mobile), they were almost immediately assaulted by a bicycler zooming down the pavement instead of the road. Malfoy yelled at him, and it was unfortunate because Harry rather liked hearing Malfoy yell at people, and also because his head was a bit achey from the night before. 

They took the lift up to Jones’ office and this time, she was waiting for them. Her assistant, Jackson, a very tan blonde in her late twenties who very much preferred the diminutive ‘Jackie,’ ushered them all in and conjured identical metal and navy cotton-upholstered chairs for them. She in turn conjured herself a navy and white striped chair with significantly more cushioning, pulled her laptop from what was apparently a bottomless blazer pocket, and sat ready to note-take.

“Thank you all for being on time this time,” Kennedy Jones said. Jackie’s fingers began flying across the keyboard. “Potter has not yet made it to the terrorist watch list, but I remain cautious of his motives so I remind each of you that failure to report suspicious behaviour to me at once will violate the Magical clauses of the Treaty of Paris of 1783.”

She eyed them sternly. No one said anything. Harry glanced at Malfoy, separated from Harry only by Padma, and found him to be sitting perfectly straight and tall, hands clasped respectfully over his crossed knee, and a relatively pleasant expression on his face. 

Internally, however, Harry knew that there would be a different situation entirely. Likely, Draco was thinking of the substitute teacher he’d had to find on short notice to take care of his classes, and whether or not he or she was royally fucking up his stated curricula. Or perhaps, he was thinking of the insults he would return to Ms Jones if he felt it weren’t too imprudent to do so. Or perhaps, he was—

Malfoy glanced at him from the corner of his eye. The side of his mouth curled up in what Harry could only describe as a _shared annoyance gesture_. They were sharing annoyance again!

Harry’s heart skipped a beat and he forced himself to look forward, straight into Ms Jones’ narrowed gaze. 

“The full briefing, then,” she said. She pulled a manila folder from her inbox and spread it open on her desk, facing towards them. All six of them leant forward to get a better look. Jackie continued typing. 

“You’ll see here the most recent event,” she said, pointing to a dark blue picture on top. She touched it with her thumb and forefinger, then spread them out on the paper, and the photograph zoomed in. Now, they could clearly see that what was a blur of blue was in fact the wreckage of an ocean liner, spread over the ocean.

Hermione gasped. “Where was this?”

“About two hundred knots east of Cape May, New Jersey. The Chesapeake Merrows have claimed it.”

“...But, but _how_?” asked Hermione. “That cruise ship has to be over 40,000 tonnes and a thousand feet long! There aren’t enough Mers in all of Britain to be able to move such a thing!”

Kennedy gave them a pointed look. “Well, as you can see, they have. There were 804 souls on board, and not a one lived. No Magicals, so far as we know. This is the first incident that has claimed American lives, and we’re having a devil of a time keeping it out of the papers. The NoMajes believe it was a hurricane. There weren’t any storms in the area at the time. We had to alter a number of memories to get the media to report that Hurricane Hanna followed that path and was a Cat 5 at that longitude.”

“Merlin,” Lee breathed. “That’s… a lot of cover up.”

Jones slid her glasses up her nose to the top of her head and regarded them seriously. At this distance, Harry could clearly see it: she was exhausted. 

“It was,” she said. “The most we’ve had in living memory. Certainly a dozen times over more than I’ve ever experienced as Director of Non-Magical Perceptions.”

“Ms Jones,” said Blaise. “Have you been working with your Muggle counterparts on the media coverage?”

She shook her head. “No. And you’ll want to call them NoMajes here instead of Muggle. It’s considered an offensive term, especially among the younger generations.” 

Jackie nodded firmly in response to this, her mouth pressed tight, but made no comment as she continued typing.

“I see,” said Blaise. “Why haven’t you been coordinating with the NoMajes then?”

“To be frank, Mr Zabini,” said Jones, “our risk analysis team does not believe we could survive the political fallout it would cause if we brought the NoMajes in. We’re in the midst of a contentious election cycle and one party in particular would find the existence of magic, and more specifically, a large-scale tragedy resulting from its existence, to be a delicious attack point. Our society, at present, could very easily return to Salem-era paranoia.”

“I see,” Blaise said again, this time much more soberly.

“That is why we demanded assistance under the Treaty of Paris clause MG-31,” Jones said. “We need all the help we can get or it’s going to be a bloodbath, and your Ministry is loath to aid any nation—even its own,” she added with a curl to her lip, “—without _firm_ pressure.”

Harry couldn’t stop staring at the zoomed in photograph of the cruise ship wreckage. There were… there were _bodies_ in the water. Blue and bloated and dispersed between floating detritus like Lego in a child’s bedroom. A helicopter hovered into a corner of the photograph and two rescue divers rappelled down, but there was no life to find there. It had all gone down with the _Star Americana 3_. 

“Do you have any intelligence suggesting that they’re planning another event such as this?” asked Padma.

“It’s hurricane season, Ms Patil. I would be very much surprised if they didn’t.”

“Then we’ll have to work fast,” said Harry.

Jones gave him another firm look. “I suggest that you do.”

-x-

They planned to visit the Chesapeake Bay that Friday. Lee had wanted to reach out to their chieftess first, to make sure they were anticipated, and it had taken a full day to secure an air-to-sea post gull and for Hermione, Padma, and Lee to craft a suitable message, then check that their translations didn’t accidentally offend or say something weird.

The meeting was scheduled just outside Annapolis in Cedarwood Cove at seven that evening, because Merpeople were, apparently, crepuscular. The six of them drove up in a Range Rover loaned to them by the Department of Non-Magical Perceptions. Padma was driving and Hermione navigating, and Blaise and Lee seemed to go back further than Harry had anticipated, which left him sitting next to Malfoy in the back row. It could’ve been worse.

For a while, he and Malfoy allowed themselves to sit in that strange silence that was lingering between them since their abrupt reconnection in DC, but by the time they hit the bridge, Harry was bored and unwilling to suffer it any longer. He turned to Malfoy.

“McGonagall let you out of your contract without trouble, I suppose?”

Malfoy gave him a flat look. “Define trouble.”

Harry laughed, shrugged. “I dunno. Without the Scottish burr in her rant?”

Malfoy returned his gaze forward, smirking. “No, the burr was there.”

Harry nodded. Just as he’d expected. “What did you tell her, actually?”

“I didn’t tell her a anything. I showed her the Pensieve memory from the Minister’s visit.”

Ooh, that was clever. Harry wished he’d done the same now. It might’ve prevented a large portion of Hermione’s disbelief when he’d first explained the situation to her. But then again, he hadn’t wanted her to know about _everything_ the Minister said.

“How’d she take it?”

“Well, the burr was present, as I said,” said Malfoy. He shrugged, faux-unconcerned. Harry could tell the difference in Malfoy though; he’d always been able to. “She assured me it wasn’t legal, that the Minister was bluffing, that how dare he, and what nerve, and _the last thing this country needs right now is another empty robe-suit with more bluster than sense_.”

“Sounds like McGonagall,” Harry agreed. “What reason did Murdoch give you?”

Malfoy’s nose wrinkled in distaste. “He said as the only _available_ Potions Master in Britain, I was perfectly suited to deal with a situation involving water and Merpeople, both of which are, on occasion, used in potions.”

Harry reared back. “There are potions that use Merpeople?!”

Malfoy gave him an unimpressed look. “Potter, there are potions that use _Muggles_. Of course there are potions that use Merpeople. But only _sociopaths_ would make those potions. It’s not like I had Mer potions on my OWL-level curriculum.”

Harry nodded thoughtfully. “I wonder why he thinks he can do stuff like this. Sending us out here and saying he’ll cause trouble for us if we don’t fix it.”

Malfoy was silent for a beat too long before he answered. When he did, all he said was, “He’s afraid of something. I don’t know what.”

That was certainly a question to be considered, Harry thought. What went through a man’s mind to pull such a high-handed political stunt? 

And really, what went through someone like Harry’s mind to go along with it? Harry could have stayed, could have taken the story to the _Prophet_ … or even the _Quibbler_. Could have made a scandal of it. 

But he didn’t. He ranted, raved, and threatened bodily harm to the Minister of Magic, but still, here he was in the Magically United States. Doing as he was told. He, Harry realised, was the reason political corruption was allowed to set in. He was the reason people got away with blackmail.

Because he had weak points. Points that could be pressed and manipulated. And those points were the people he loved. Harry wouldn’t let their lives get ruined because he was being blackmailed. He would suck it up and do it, complaining the whole time. 

And so would Malfoy.

And Minister Murdoch knew that about them. What a fucking brazen knob.

In time, they arrived at their destination, and Padma pulled off the road to park. They stepped out of the Range Rover and walked to the shore. The edge of the cove was built up with large water-worn rocks and pebbles. Sitting upon one, a Merwoman waited for them. She was wearing a crown woven with kelp and shells and she had a shawl of shipwreck canvas around her shoulders, though it did little to cover her bare, blue-green breasts. Quite perky, Harry noticed. Gravity was kind to the sea dwelling.

When they got close enough, Lee took the lead, bowing to her and saying a few words in stilted Celtic Mer, which he’d learned from Hermione last night.

The Merwoman screeched back, and Lee, Hermione, and Padma looked relieved. 

Padma turned back and said, “She accepts our request to speak, though we must join her underwater, as she’s drying out. Bubblehead Charms on, and let’s go.”

Draco looked annoyed. Harry didn’t blame him. He was rather wishing he’d worn lighter shoes and trousers. Jeans and boots were dreadful to swim in. But they applied their Bubblehead Charms just the same, and hopped into the water.

To Harry’s infinite surprise, the Chieftess swirled her webbed hands around her head and a simulacrum of a Bubblehead Charm formed over her face and gills. She slid into the water and they followed her down.

Hermione was the first to ask about it, of course. “Why do you need oxygen underwater?” she called out through her Bubblehead Charm. The words came out warbly, but English.

The Chieftess looked back at them over her shoulder as she led them further into the bay. “The cove is bad water,” she said, in a voice that sounded much lovelier underwater. It had a very recognizable Scottish burr, too. “There is no air here.”

Harry blinked quickly. “No air?” he said, voice muffled. 

Water was literally made of oxygen and hydrogen. How could the sea beings not be able to breathe? But then, just as soon as he asked the question, he knew the answer: it was a dead zone, sucked dry of oxygen by pollution and the algae that thrived in it.

“Land-human sands,” said the Chieftess. “They pour their dirty sands in the water and it snatches the air away. Then the algae come. When the algae come, we have to leave the bay, swim out to the ocean, but it’s bad for the fry and fingerlings. They’re too small, currents too strong. The whales and sharks get them. Sometimes the squids.”

Harry stopped swimming to pull out an empty vial. He filled it with water, capped it, and stuffed it back in his buttoned-pocket. There was likely a high amount of phosphorus or nitrate in the water here, if it was a dead zone. He’d have to check when he got back to the lab, but if the dead zone extended far into the bay, or was a regular occurrence, then that meant that this was a more serious problem than he’d thought.

“What are you thinking, Potter?” asked Malfoy.

His hair floated around his face in lovely, undulating waves, and Harry had to swallow before he could answer. He’d never known Malfoy could look so… so beautiful. He mentally grimaced at his own thoughts.

“It may not just be pollution,” Harry said. “If their waters are hypoxic, then that’s going to be a lot harder to fix than just trawling the bay for floating rubbish.”

Malfoy reached up and brushed his hair back from his face, but it floated out again, and Harry desperately wanted to touch it himself. How smooth would it feel underwater? How would it fall against his face when he stepped out? Suddenly, he was reminded of visiting Malfoy at Hogwarts, waiting for him to finish brewing so they could talk the Chemistry-Potions divide and Malfoy could rip him off on some litmus papers. Malfoy’s hair had always stuck against his face then, damp from the heat of his cauldron, and Harry had always wanted to brush it back then, too.

“Fuck,” said Malfoy. The sound carried with the waves.

Harry grimaced, nodding. “Let’s go.”

They hurried to catch up to the others, who were being lead further and further into the Bay. When they reached the open water, the Chieftess released her Bubblehead Charm and said, “We’re nearly there. It’s just down to the seafloor, now.”

There was a steep drop, and it was so dark that Harry couldn’t see the bottom. He lit his wand as they swam down into the abyss, but abruptly, they passed through an odd, almost natural ward and then there was light. The Chesapeake Merrow Nation’s community was vibrant from above, with anglerfish lights strung all around, little houses built from shipwrecks and sand, and in the centre, the Chieftess’s home, built of a sunken schooner. The central mast had a Scottish flag with shells embroidered around the edges raised to full-mast. It was much colder down here.

They swam down into the schooner and were greeted by the warm glow of underwater candlelight — a feat that Harry was eager to know more about. The candle flames flickered and waved in the water like real fire, and indeed when he pressed a finger to them, it burnt like a motherfucker. He pulled his finger back, sticking it in his mouth as Malfoy cackled gurgly behind him.

“Oh fuck off,” Harry muttered. “You can’t really expect anyone to believe fire underwater would be hot.”

“It’s _fire_ , Potter,” said Malfoy.

“It’s _underwater_ , Malfoy,” said Harry.

Malfoy shrugged. 

The Chieftess said, “We learned to make fire the same time land-humans did. Your kind aren’t any more talented than us.”

“Of course we don’t think that,” Hermione jumped in quickly. “But it is surprising to see fire burning underwater. On land, water puts fire out. How do you do it?”

The Chieftess shrugged. “Heat grows where heat wants to grow. We needn’t do anything but encourage it.”

“Riiight,” said Blaise.

Padma kicked him discreetly. Bubbles exploded from the movement.

The Chieftess gestured to some sea flora that resembled chairs. “Please sit. I will bring caviar and kelp.”

She swam through the door to the next room, and they could hear her rooting around in the cabinets. Harry swam over to the closest loveseat-chair thing and tried to sit without floating away. To his infinite pleasure, Malfoy followed him over. He applied a warming charm; it was just too fucking cold at the bottom of the Chesapeake Bay.

“How do we stay sitting?” he whispered.

“Put this in your lap,” said Padma, passing him a large stone. 

Malfoy gave her a look that Harry clearly interpreted to be ‘Are you out of your fucking mind?’ and he agreed with the sentiment. What man would put a large rock on his lap? It was just asking for trouble. And yet, they were all struggling to stay seated while Hermione and Padma sat primly on two squishy anemone pods. 

“Fine,” Malfoy said, taking the stone. He set it, gingerly, on his lap.

Seeing that he did not immediately curl inwards in agony, Harry, Blaise, and Lee also accepted stones. They were all settled in when the Chieftess returned with stone bowls full of fat caviar and a variety of kelps. Blaise, Padma, and Malfoy immediately helped themselves, but Harry was a bit warier. Didn’t they get caviar by squeezing pregnant fish through two rollers? Did Merrows do it the same way?

It rather grossed him out, so he settled on a few strands of purple kelp for the time being. All of them remembered they were wearing a Bubblehead Charms around the same time. Harry held his kelp plate in his lap, trying to find some way to ingest it without breaking his bubble or, failing that, just not look like an arsehole refusing his hostess’s food. They were going to have to get Gillyweed if they did this again. 

“So,” said the Chieftess. “You are the first land-humans to respond to our requests.”

Blaise snorted. “Requests is not the term I would use for such actions.”

The Chieftess sneered, and Harry saw that all of her teeth were quite pointed. “We have found that we are easy to ignore if we don’t make ourselves impossible to ignore. Land-humans think that we will just go away if they don’t come near the water, and that is probably true. If we don’t get help, we will all die out. We’ve lost seven fry this year alone from suffocation or choking, and my sister’s fingerling was snatched by a white shark last season when we were forced into the ocean. My _niece_ ,” she stressed. “She was only four.”

Harry felt his stomach turn. The idea of children being _eaten_ by sharks was like something from a horror movie, but here, it was real. It was something that happened not infrequently, and the more the Mers were forced out into the open ocean, the more often it would happen. He couldn’t stop thinking of _Jaws_ and it made him want to throw up.

“My god,” Padma whispered.

“She has not helped us recently,” the Chieftess sniffed. “We do not know how to fix our waters. They grow dirtier and dirtier and we don’t have the right magic for that.”

“We’re going to help,” Lee promised. “That’s why we’ve come. My name is Lee. I’m a negotiator on land. It’s my job to solve problems between two parties.”

The Chieftess nodded slowly. “I am Chieftess Undine McConch. My tribe immigrated here twenty-six years ago, when the waters of the Hebrides died. My mother was Chieftess then, and she led us to prosperity. Now, our waters here are dying. We can’t move again. There are no free waters left to settle. The living coasts are all claimed now.”

“Then we’ll fix these waters for you,” Harry said. “But you have to stop the attacks.”

She gave him a cautious look. “Can you?”

“Yes,” Harry said, having no idea how, exactly he would. Lee and Hermione gave him annoyed looks. Harry ignored them. “I study water as my job. I’ll figure out what’s causing the… what’s stealing the air from the water and we’ll fix it.”

“And the trash?” asked Chieftess Undine. “The fish swallow the _plastics_ and then our children die when they eat the fish.”

“We’ll try to solve that, too,” said Blaise. “We’ll work on a plan to get it out of the water and, hopefully, keep it out.”

Chieftess Undine sagged, giving them all a small smile. “Then we will comply. You have our gratitude, but be warned, if you fail to honour your promise, we will fail to honour ours.”

-x-

Though they’d made significant progress with Chieftess Undine, the swim to the surface was marked by somber silence. The job was bigger than they’d thought. And Harry, for one, could not stop thinking about the Chieftess’s four-year-old niece being eaten alive by a Great White.

He had to force himself not to sick up in his Bubblehead Charm, and was still barely making it by reciting the Periodic Table in his head. They were swimming alongside a school of white perch when something startled the fish and they ricocheted left. 

The rush sent sprays of bubbles in all directions as the fish hurried away, but the confusion didn’t end when they cleared. As the bubbles dissipated, Harry saw Draco struggling to re-cast his Bubblehead Charm, apparently popped by the perch, but he was out of breath and the re-cast spell was fizzling. 

Harry’s heart skipped a beat. He went dizzy with fear before he even realised how big the danger was.

Draco was some feet away and even from this distance, Harry could see his hands shaking in terror. Draco cast again, but his lungs were depleted and even if he did get a new Bubblehead up now, there was no air around him to fill it. It would be a bubble of water. Harry looked up. The others were above them and hadn’t yet noticed the emergency, but the surface was still a two minutes swim to the top. Draco would never make it.

What the fuck could he do? Time was going so slow, and Draco’s lips were blueing.

Suddenly, a very stupid idea came to Harry, but if he knew his water — and he did — there was a chance he could save Draco. He just had to be very careful. Surface tension was a tricky thing.

Harry kicked hard, swimming the distance between them. He grabbed Draco’s shoulders and carefully pulled him in, angling his pointy nose and chin just so. Harry’s Bubblehead Charm parted for Draco to enter and reformed around them without a leak. Just like soapy dishes in the sink.

They both exhaled shakily, their breath brushing against one another’s lips. Harry shuddered, not entirely from the adrenalin. He’d never been this close to Draco before, though he’d certainly fantasised about it. And he was finding that the fantasy had nothing on the raw throb of _want_ he felt right now, in this most inappropriate situation. The fear was fucking with his emotions, his reactions, and all he could do was focus on desire to keep from passing out from the terror.

For a moment, his plan had been to breathe into Draco’s mouth like in Harry’s favourite movie, _Water World_ , but he’d, fortunately, stopped himself when he realised Draco would be able to breathe just by sharing the same charm, which, fortunately, was able to filter oxygen from the surrounding water when it was running low. They had a few minutes.

“Are you okay?” Harry breathed, afraid to move too quickly, lest his fragile Bubblehead break, too.

Draco was close to hyperventilating, but he nodded, quickly at first and then very tightly when he remembered the Charm.

“Second time,” Draco said, his voice cracking. They were forced so close together, his lips brushed against Harry’s when he spoke.

“What?” said Harry.

Draco swallowed. “Second time I’ve nearly drowned.”

“When—”

“Draco!” called Blaise.

“Harry!” Hermione followed. 

They’d noticed them, arms wrapped tightly around one another, lips brushing, carefully floating in the current. 

“Oh my god,” said Padma. “Draco! Your charm!”

“Be careful, Padma!” Blaise said, swimming down to them. 

Harry couldn’t move his head far enough to look, but he could hear the terrible desperation in Blaise’s voice. Padma wasn’t anywhere near them; he was just scared of finally losing the only man in his life who hadn’t died under mysterious circumstances.

“Harry, _Christ_ ,” said Lee. “What the hell?”

Which Harry thought was uncalled for. He’d had an earful of the ‘Christ-figure’ pet theories from Hermione after the war, when she’d had a few months to digest his death and resurrection, plus, he supposed, all the years of suffering. Merlin, he was already going delirious. Was their oxygen depleting faster than the charm could filter fresh air in? Were they back in the dead zone where it couldn’t?

“They can’t come apart,” Hermione said, voice tight. “Or Harry’s Bubblehead will burst, too, and we can’t re-cast underwater.” 

Staring, as he was, right into Draco’s eyes, Harry could see the withering look he _ached_ to give Hermione for that comment. If only he could turn his head. As it was, his chest was still heaving from the aftershocks of terror, and he was in no position to give anyone but Harry that withering look.

In response, Harry moved his hands from Draco’s shoulders, wrapped them around his waist to pull him in tighter. “We can’t come apart,” he whispered, needlessly. 

Draco nodded and wrapped his own around Harry.

“They won’t be able to swim without disturbing the charm. We need to help float them to the surface,” said Padma. “Levitation charm?”

“A very controlled one,” Hermione agreed.

Blaise wanted to help, but the women put that to bed very quickly. “You’re in no state,” said Hermione, matter-of-factly. “Look, your Bubblehead is wobbling from your hyperventilation. You need to worry about yourself. Get to the surface, Blaise, and we’ll get Harry and Malfoy up. Lee, can you help him?”

“Yeah, got it.” He took Blaise by the arm and started pulling him up, his feet kicking harder to counteract Blaise’s unwillingness to rise without Draco.

Harry watched Draco. His breathing was slowing, but his eyes still looked wild, and Harry knew that the terror he showed was not even half of what he felt. Harry tightened his arms once, a hidden reminder that Draco was safe. Safer — which was “safe” in Harry’s world.

“Harry, I’m going to grab onto the back of your shirt and levitate myself up,” said Hermione. “Don’t try to kick to help. We have to be really gentle. Padma, can you get Draco?”

“Got him,” said Padma, swimming round to take hold of Draco’s shirt hem. She grabbed low to keep from disturbing the Bubblehead Charm, which was smart, but came with a downside in that it made Draco’s shirt ride up. Harry’s eyes flicked down as he felt the shirt bunch against where his hands wrapped around Draco’s waist. He could just barely make out a sliver of skin.

_God, what a perv you are_ , he thought to himself. But it was better than freaking out.

Determinedly, he pulled his eyes back up to Draco’s face. One would think they would have realised they could turn their faces enough to lay their chins on one another’s shoulders instead of staring right at one another, but Draco hadn’t, and Harry wasn’t stupid enough to give up this position, so he didn’t. 

Their breath mingled. Draco’s was slowing, thankfully, and now Harry could hear the background of silence all around them, how the ocean currents drifted by in echoing murmurings, how the movement caused by Hermione taking hold of the back of Harry’s shirt sent little warbly sounds spreading all around. 

Harry’s shirt hem bunched around Draco’s fingers and the girls began to tow them up. Padma and Hermione’s feet were kicking slowly, smoothly, to help guide the levitation charm — doing their best to get them to the surface fast without disturbing the weakened Bubblehead Charm they shared.

“Yay, we’ll live,” Harry whispered.

Draco didn’t respond. But a moment passed and then Harry felt it: a single finger had moved below the bunched hem of his t-shirt and was now resting against Harry’s last rib. 

His breath caught. He released it in a shudder, and then a second finger followed and then Draco was _caressing_ Harry’s last rib with gentle, watery strokes. Harry stared at him, eyes wide.

Draco’s expression remained unchanged. 

_You sneaky little fuck_ , Harry thought, as his skin lit on fire with sudden desire. That was _entirely_ the wrong emotion to be feeling right now. 

He let his hand trail lower over Draco’s back, not one for half-arsing anything. His palm slid against the small curve of Draco’s waist, settled against the heat of his wet skin. Their legs mingled, maybe from the currents, maybe from plausible deniability, but there was nothing plausibly deniable about the hard-on Harry had right now.

Which Draco could certainly feel. Because he _smirked_.

They were potentially dying, and Draco was absolutely still scared, and yet Harry was turned on and Draco was smirking, and _what the fuck_ was wrong with them?

And then all too soon, wobbly rays of sunlight began to filter down and Harry knew they were nearing the surface.

“Almost there!” Padma called from above. “Hang on, boys!”

Harry hung on, mostly to Draco’s lower back, but a bit also to his thighs. He’d learned to take direction very well in recent years. And then the light came down hard on them and Harry knew without looking that they were there, that they could release one another and bob safely to the surface. 

Regretfully, he let his hand slide back up, just as their faces broke the surface. Draco pulled back and the Charm stretched and popped, and then that almost-dying-almost-kissing moment was gone. Harry breathed in, let fresh, dry air fill his lungs, and felt emptier now than he had holding his breath.

Blaise was sitting on the rocks but jumped right back in when he saw Draco. 

“Are you okay? Are you alive?”

“I’m obviously alive, Blaise,” Draco said, as he set into a very graceful swim towards the shore. Blaise treaded water, making several abortive attempts to swim out to Draco, but apparently knowing quite well how Draco would react to babying.

When Draco reached him, all bets were off, and Blaise looped an arm underneath him and helped him the final way to the shore. 

Meanwhile, everyone let Harry swim back by himself. He rolled his eyes.

They dried off with discreet charms before hopping back in the Rover. Padma drove again, and Hermione navigated again, but the ride back to DC was heavy with quiet. Harry, for one, couldn’t stop thinking of that thing Draco’d said, that… that first comment, when Harry had pulled him in. 

_The second time_ , Draco had said. 

But when was the first?

That was all Harry thought about the entire way home. He barely registered the heat from Draco’s dry leg pressed against his own in the back seat. They could’ve talked of that bastard Minister again, but they said nothing instead.

-x-


	6. Chapter 6: A Seahorse & the Grimmauld Place Kitchen Table

They didn’t get any more work done on the project that night. The close call with Draco 300 metres under the water was still making Harry feel ill, and he suspected the same was true for the others. It wasn’t just that Draco had nearly drowned; it was that _any_ of them could have drowned. As witches and wizards, they took for granted that magic could save them… and this time, if they’d been alone when that happened, they would have died.

Maybe they would’ve thought fast with a strong Levitation charm or a propulsion spell to get them to the surface, but the likelihood they were unconscious when they hit it would have been high. And then they would’ve just drowned up there instead.

And there was something else, too: The way Draco had gasped for air down there. Had the Merrows done the same thing when their waters died? Had the frys and the fingerlings accidentally swum into hypoxic waters and suffocated without knowing why they couldn’t breathe or what to do?

And there, again, was that vivid image in his head of a four-year-old Mermaiden being crunched between the teeth of a Great White, her blood swirling out into the water, her family tasting it in their mouths as they rushed to try to save her. And being unsuccessful.

Harry wanted to throw up.

He decided to drink instead. 

Padma dropped Harry, Hermione, and Lee off at their Airbnb, and the three of them went inside without a word. Hermione set up shop with her laptop and Wikipedia in front of Netflix. Lee took the kitchen table. Harry could’ve joined either of them, but he was feeling raw, as though his guts were spread open for anyone to see if they looked. He couldn’t stand to have them look at him right now, so he went upstairs to his room. 

Mrs Black was propped on his dresser, and she didn’t look impressed by his state. Dry or not, he still stunk of fish and he had bits of kelp in his hair.

“Good heavens, Mr Potter. You look as though you crawled out of the same sewer your moth—”

“Not a good time, Mrs Black,” Harry said, shortly.

Mrs Black pursed her lips and turned away.

Harry stripped his t-shirt off and tossed it in the corner, only belatedly remembering that Kreacher was dead and certainly not in the United States. He was going to have to find a wash-and-fold somewhere unless the house had a machine because his cleaning charms were rubbish. The stink of rotting algae stung his nose. He needed a shower bad, and maybe a good wank, which would be hard to get in the single bath this place had. 

Harry eyed his trunk narrowly. 

“Oh, what the hell,” he muttered, and flipped open the lid. 

The stairs down led into his attic at Grimmauld Place, and then it was only another two floors before he was in his bedroom and the _en suite_ he’d added after the war. It had twelve scented taps and a waterfall showerhead. And his favourite wanking cream. He hoped the magic that connected the Grimmauld Place plumbing to whatever pipes were nearby was still operational after that transatlantic relocation.

Harry stripped down and tried the taps. Hot water shot out with even better water pressure than he’d had at home. Relieved, he stepped into the shower and just stood there, letting the heat of stolen water wash away the bay’s funkiness and Draco’s near-death. 

Except what could wash away that memory? 

Harry was not necessarily the type to trip all over himself with his emotions. He felt them, and he felt them hard, but he’d learned a long time ago to live _with_ them instead of against them. He was used to feeling shitty things or feeling wonderful things in the moment they happened, and then returning to a pretty balanced baseline. 

And yet, seeing Draco’s panic, learning it was not the first time… he didn’t know what to think about how those things made him feel. Like maybe they’d intensified the yearning he’d felt every time he went to Malfoy’s Hogwarts office… like he’d been tongueing a cut on his lip for years and now he’d decided to bite it all the way open and now blood was gushing out of his heart and swirling all in the water—

_No_.

At any rate, he wasn’t interested in wanking anymore.

Harry grabbed his bar shampoo and scrubbed it into his hair, dragging it harder over his scalp than he really needed to. What was Chieftess Undine’s niece’s name? What games did she play? What watery books did she read? Did she want to be chieftess when she grew up?

If Draco had died and Harry had never known, he would have drowned right there with him, and been nothing but a Dementor shell that went through the motions of all his days without any fears or dreams to feed on.

He couldn’t keep tonguing the cut Draco left in him. He had to tear it open. He had to _know_. Because the chance to do it could disappear in a single moment.

Harry finished scrubbing his hair, took a few passes over the rest of his kelp-covered body, and rinsed off. He cut the taps and stepped out onto the rug Kreacher had repaired for him just a week before his death.

But Harry had known Kreacher was dying. Kreacher had told him and Mrs Black. Elves knew their time. Harry had had time to prepare. Draco could have killed them both in that water, and it would’ve been a surprise. A horrifying surprise.

He dried off quickly, newly invigorated with a purpose besides ‘Maybe get to go home one day.’ Back in his Grimmauld Place bedroom, he pulled his mobile from his jeans pocket and texted Malfoy’s number.

> _Come over. Door’s unlocked. I’m in my trunk. 1st floor, back bedroom. Bring litmus strips._

He tossed his phone onto the bed and rummaged through his armoire for a clean pair of pants. The only clean shirt still left down here was the Holyhead Harpies one from Ginny he’d nearly worn to pieces, but it still fit, so he threw it on with a pair of clean jeans and didn’t bother with socks. The upper bedrooms in Grimmauld had always stayed warm, even while the living area’s charms had worn off a decade ago.

Harry flopped back on his bed next to his mobile and crossed his hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling and thinking of hypoxic waters while he waited. His phone vibrated. Harry grabbed blindly for it and brought it to his face.

> _You are so fucking entitled. Give me 15._

Harry smirked and tossed it back on the bed.

It was actually sixteen minutes later when Harry heard the attic door open and then the sound of heavy boots climbing down the attic ladder. Harry listened for the cautious footsteps on the floor above, indicating Draco looking for his bedroom, then coming down the stairs to the first floor landing. And still no obvious sight of Harry. When would Draco give up and—

“Potter!” Draco shouted, the two Ts clipped in annoyance just how Harry liked. “I’ll have you know the door was _not_ unlocked and I had to speak to Granger to get in!” 

Harry grinned. 

“In here!” he said. “Last bedroom!”

The footsteps quickened and then Draco pushed the door open, scowling. “What is the meaning of—Potter, what are you doing?”

“Lounging,” said Harry. Draco threw litmus paper at his face. Harry caught and pocketed it.

“And then I thought I might start drinking.”

“Oh?” Draco said, suddenly more interested. “Have you got Ogden’s in this house?”

“Have I got Ogden’s, he says,” Harry said. He hopped up from the bed and slid by Draco. “Come with me.”

“Again with the entitlement!” Draco snapped.

Harry ignored him. He kept the liquor cabinet in his lab because… well, probably because he was stupid and invited explosions into his life, but there you go. He led them further into Grimmauld Place within the trunk, down to the basement and what used to be the kitchen.

Harry turned the knob on his lab door and jiggled it open before turning to look back at Malfoy. He was staring at the walls as if he could almost remember what they looked like before. He turned back to Harry and raised his eyebrows.

“The Firewhisky, Potter?”

“Right,” said Harry. 

He swung the door fully open and flicked the lights on. Sconces lit all around the room and the light bounced off stainless steel surfaces, glimmering like little bonfires against the antique wood panelling of the walls. Harry’s favourite set of crystal beakers, a gift from Hermione’s Mum and Dad, were shimmering on his desk — more a decorative accent than anything he used with any regularity. He was afraid of breaking them.

And off in the corner, “—Fuck!” Harry said. He rushed over to said corner.

“What—?” said Malfoy.

Harry ignored him. How could he have forgotten? How could he have been such a stupid, terrible, awful person? “Seabiscuit!” Harry exclaimed, bending down to peer into the tank. “Bikki, boy, are you okay?” 

His seahorse stared at him dourly. Harry somewhat expected Malfoy to crack a joke about Harry having a pet fish, but instead he just followed Harry over to the fishtank and peered inside. Seabiscuit flicked his tail at both of them and swum over to his castle. A very pointed ‘Fuck you’ if Harry had ever seen one.

“Mate, I’m really sorry,” Harry said. He was already reaching for the biscuit tin and crumbling in a gingersnap. Seabiscuit didn’t emerge from his castle, even though it was his favourite. Harry despaired. “Biscuit, come on buddy. It was just a couple days. I’ve been really busy and stressed out. I totally forgot.”

A flurry of bubbles shot from the castle gate, the result, no doubt, of an angry tail flick from Seabiscuit. “I know, I know, it’s no excuse. But come on… Okay, fine. What if there was bacon on offer?”

Seabiscuit poked his nose out of the castle window. Harry ran over to the mini icebox where he stored his samples and Seabiscuit’s perishable food, and pulled out half a strip of bacon. Seabiscuit followed his movements keenly. Harry held it above the tank and Seabiscuit swam up to the surface. 

“Ah ah,” Harry said. 

Seabiscuit glared at him. 

“Will you forgive me?” Seabiscuit glared harder. “What if I take your tank up with me and Mrs Black?” 

Seabiscuit considered this for a moment, and then flicked his tail once. Relieved, Harry crumbled the bacon into the tank and watched as he swam around snatching up the pieces. When he was done, Harry didn’t miss the covert snatches of the gingersnap pieces, either.

“So,” Malfoy said, when Harry was assured his pet would live. “A seahorse.”

“Yes, a seahorse,” Harry replied elegantly. As if having a pet seahorse in one’s chemistry lab was a totally normal thing. He turned away to grab the Ogden’s — hard to remember that’s even what they were coming down for after all this nonsense — but Draco grabbed his elbow and turned him back. 

Harry’s breath hitched. He tried to hide it, and maybe was even successful.

“Yes?”

“ _Why_ do you have a seahorse?”

“I found him in the Channel a few years ago. He had an absent father.”

“An absent father,” Draco repeated.

“Yes,” said Harry, exasperated. “Seahorses are raised by their fathers, but Seabiscuit’s abandoned him and his siblings. The others were eaten by an Anglerfish, but he was lucky enough to get tangled in a kelp forest and I rescued him before he could be overtaken by a reef of particularly fertile oysters.”

“And that’s another thing,” Malfoy said. “Seabiscuit.”

“It’s a fine name for a seahorse, Malfoy,” Harry replied, eyes narrowed.

“Where the fuck do you get a name like Seabiscuit when you could have given him a respectable, regal name, like Draco? He does look like a little dragon, doesn’t he?”

“A little dragon, eh?” Harry said, smirking. He turned fully back around, finding himself very much in Draco’s personal space, but Draco didn’t step back. “Is that what your Mum calls you?”

Draco sniffed. “As if, Potter. But really—Seabiscuit?”

“Seabiscuit was a horse that won a lot of races, Malfoy,” Harry said, patiently. “Bikki’s from the sea and he likes gingersnaps. It was really too perfect to pass up.”

“If you say so,” Draco said. He didn’t sound convinced. That was okay; Harry didn’t need committee approval before naming a fucking seahorse. They stared at one another a tick too long. 

Draco, finally, said, “So—the Ogden’s?”

And just like that, they were back in the real world. The world where seahorses were eaten by Anglerfish and little girl Mermaidens were eaten by sharks and Harry and Draco had to save the whole goddamned world — again — before they could go home. Where Harry was suddenly confronted again by an emotional attachment he’d hoped would’ve died by now.

“It’s over here,” Harry said, tipping his head. “Have a seat.”

Draco sat down at the big wooden worktable in the middle of the lab where Harry did all of his work that didn’t need special sterilization. It was, actually, the old kitchen table from Grimmauld, just cleaned up, and Harry liked having it in his lab because it toned down the stainless steel and made it feel a bit more lived-in. Harry bent and rummaged through his small (efficient) liquor cabinet for the half-finished bottle of Ogden’s Firewhisky. 

He quickly set up the experiments and tests he’d intended for the water samples, then grabbed two glasses and returned to the table, pulling out the stool opposite Draco. He poured them both a couple fingers and slid one glass across to Malfoy. 

“So, cheers, I guess,” said Harry.

Draco tipped his glass to him and they both took a slow sip. Their glasses clunked against the wood of the table in quick succession, and it sounded to Harry like the sharp, abortive noise of finality. 

“So, today was cheerful,” Harry observed.

Draco humphed in an unnecessarily disdainful way, if Harry were consulted on it. “Yes, just the ticket after the troubles earlier this week.”

Harry slumped on his stool, frowning down at the table. The wood was worn smooth and shiny from so many years of use, which could have been an allegory for how Harry felt this week. He’d loved his job back in London. He’d loved the work, and the people he worked with—all Muggles. He’d loved getting to scuba dive and travel all over Britain to collect samples. He’d loved swimming with kelpies in the Scottish Lochs and Mers along the Irish coast and all of the mundane fish, too. And he’d had to leave it all behind to come save the United States. 

It was not that he didn’t want to help—water was water all over the globe and he understood current patterns and tides; bad water on the Eastern Shore of Maryland would eventually be bad water on the coast of Greenland, thanks to the Gulf Stream. The world was one giant system, and all parts needed to work for any of them to work.

So no, it wasn’t that he’d been asked to come to the United States to help fix a problem with water. 

It was that he knew they’d just been waiting for an excuse to send him off without officially ‘exiling’ him — because how could the Ministry exile the Boy Who Lived? But as soon as any international issue having remotely to do with water had come up, off he’d been sent. With barely a week’s notice, with no opportunity to decline, no opportunity to even ask for leave from work, no opportunity to settle his personal affairs more thoroughly than going to Gringotts and saying, ‘I guess I just need to withdraw it all.’

“Why’d you bring your whole house?” asked Draco.

And no opportunity to pack up his house, find the things he needed, put the rest in storage. The night before his Portkey, he’d been on the cliff’s edge of frustration and sentimentality, and decided to say ‘fuck it’ to the whole ordeal. He would just take it all. So that’s how his house had been removed from between two other townhouses, packed into a trunk, and organised to be accessible. Well, that plus Hermione.

“I wasn’t sure if I’d ever get to come back.”

“They can’t exile you,” Draco said, rolling his eyes.

“No,” Harry agreed. “But they can make coming back feel like a punishment. And you know that yourself.”

Malfoy grimaced, took another drink from his Firewhisky. “But I will go back. I won’t give them the satisfaction of taking my property or my family magic.”

Harry shrugged. “You could just pack it all up and take it somewhere else.”

Malfoy cocked his head. “You don’t want to go back, do you?”

Harry exhaled heavily. “I don’t know. I… London is my home, but I guess before that, Hogwarts was my home. I love the city, but I guess London has never really _felt_ like home like Hogwarts did. The Ministry has never welcomed me since I turned down their offer to become an Auror. I think they felt like if I wasn’t a Ministry employee, then I was a Ministry enemy.”

“Aren’t you?” 

Harry looked up sharply. “Am I an enemy to the Ministry? Are you daft?”

Draco shrugged, ran the tip of this finger around his glass and made the crystal sing. Harry’s skin tingled deliciously. “Do you support their policies, the way they govern?”

“I don’t even know _how_ they govern, Malfoy,” Harry said, exasperated. “I stopped following politics eight or nine years ago.”

“But before, I mean,” said Draco. “You turned down the Aurory’s offer for a reason. Don’t even give me some bullshit about being done with fighting or whatever. I know you. You’ll always fight. You don’t know how _not_ to. So it’s something else.”

Harry swallowed. That had felt a little too on-the-nose. 

The wall torches dimmed a little, as they were programmed to do if Harry was at this worktable for an extended period, and not at his microscopes, and suddenly, it felt like they were back again in Draco’s office at Hogwarts, with several potions bubbling in the background and the smell of cloves from Draco’s coffee warm in Harry’s nose.

“I didn’t agree with what Shacklebolt and the rest of them chose to do after the War, no,” Harry agreed. “At first, with the trials, I didn’t notice. It all happened so fast and I was… frankly, I wasn’t all there right after the War. I was a mess, and I missed a dozen opportunities to insist on changes, but then they were gone. People were back in their comfortable zones of status quo, already afraid of moving forward again, already setting themselves up in the same paranoid, terrified, conservative habits and policies that got us into war the last time. 

“And then I realised that people don’t want to change… not unless you force them to, or maybe make the change feel more desirable than staying the same. But I didn’t want to force anyone, and I didn’t know how to show them all a future that was better, that moved forward, that lived in possibility instead of paranoia. So, you’re right. I hated it, and I left instead of doing anything about it.”

Draco studied him, and for once, Harry didn’t go hot under the scrutiny. He felt calmer now, having said all that. It was something Hermione and Ron knew, but Harry still didn’t like to vocalise. 

They had chosen to keep trying, and there was still some tension between Harry and Ron that Harry had, in Ron’s words, ‘given up’ and not joined him in Auror training. And Hermione would never say it, but she found it hard to stop trying, too, and she couldn’t understand how Harry would walk away from a good fight.

But then, here she was with him, walking away from her failed marriage instead of trying not to ‘give up’ on it. Harry knew first hand how hard it was to stay in a relationship when one’s partner was the wrong gender, and that made it all the harder to watch their marriage dissolve, like salt into water. Pretending as if nothing meaningful had ever been there, when they all knew there had been. There always was.

He took another sip from his glass and found it empty. He grabbed the Ogden’s and topped them both off.

“And you, Malfoy,” Harry said, staring at him. “I’m surprised you didn’t kick up more of a fuss over this assignment.”

Malfoy shrugged. “Being asked to solve an international crisis because I’m the only Potions Master qualified for it? It’s quite an honour.”

Harry rolled his eyes. “Pull the other one. How about the blackmail?”

“There was that, too, of course,” said Draco. “The Minister came to visit me in person—another honour—and threatened to pull up some old charges from the DMLE that were never brought forward after you had me and Mother cleared. Said they were grounds for restitution, and that our Manor and the adjacent property would just about cover it.”

“And yet you didn’t go straight to the _Prophet_ with charges of blackmail,” Harry observed.

“It didn’t feel like the right battle to fight.”

“And you didn't want to lose access to your family magic,” Harry said.

“I could have hidden the Manor and our land so thoroughly Merlin himself wouldn’t have ever found it, Potter. Malfoy blood wards are nothing to scoff at. But I couldn’t have said no, even still. Mother and I are only now beginning to restore the name. If I’d said no, it would have destroyed all the progress we’d made. We’d be villains, with poor dying Merkids splashed — literally — on the cover of every newspaper, and my mugshot right next to it. We’d have our Manor, but we’d have no life.”

Harry sighed. “It was hinted that the Minister didn’t know if he could trust anyone who would associate with someone who’d ignore an international crisis. Which was code, of course, for ‘We’ll fire Ron and Arthur Weasley and good luck to Hermione ever securing research funding for werewolves again.’”

“Of course,” Draco said. He sipped his Firewhisky.

“So I guess we’ve got to save the goddamned world,” Harry sighed. 

“We’d better, or I’ll be having nightmares about Merkids getting eaten alive for the rest of my life,” Malfoy muttered.

Harry tossed back the rest of his Firewhisky. “Tell me about the first time.”

Draco blinked once. “The first time,” he repeated.

“You know what I’m talking about,” Harry said. 

Draco grimaced. “I don’t like the first time.”

“Did you like the second?” asked Harry.

“Of fucking course not,” Draco said. “But the first time was especially abhorrent.”

“Voldemort,” Harry guessed.

Draco sighed and finished off his Firewhisky, too. “Yes, the Dark Lord. Over Christmas hols… that year… he dunked me in the lake at the Manor to… encourage me to do a better job with my assignment. For about six minutes. That’s what Mother says, anyway. I wasn’t breathing for five of them.”

“That’s so fucked,” Harry decided. “I think if I’d been you, I would have rounded up my Mum and moved to America. Or Chile, maybe. Voldemort probably would’ve ignored countries that didn’t speak English.”

“You would not have done that,” said Draco. “You’re too stupid.”

“No, I said if I’d been _you_ that’s what I would’ve done,” Harry clarified. 

Draco snorted. “We could’ve come here,” he agreed. “My cousins are here in New York. The American Malfoys. They would’ve taken us in for the War. But my father was stupid, and he taught me to be stupid, and by the time any of us wised up, the Dark Lord was already sleeping in one of our guest rooms.” He frowned, settled his chin into his palm. 

“Have you contacted them since you got here?” Harry wondered. The idea of cousins was so foreign to him. Save for Dudley, who Harry still didn’t really consider himself related to, he had none. What would it have been like to have several? Several who weren’t cruel little shits, that is?

“I hate his name,” Malfoy said, sighing. “It’s hard for me to even pull him up in my mobile contacts.”

Harry blinked several times. “You have a mobile?” he said. “I mean, you had one before you came here?”

“I kept one for Blaise and Pansy, mostly,” Draco explained. “They live on the continent now, and the magical societies are much more integrated there, like here.”

“What’s his name?”

“Kyle,” Draco said, distastefully. “Kyle Ulysses Malfoy.” 

Harry did remember hearing something about that now that he thought about it. “It doesn’t really flow, does it?” he offered.

“The only place it would flow is into a sewer,” said Draco. “It’s a disgrace to a fine heritage. And now he’s head of the American line. A great empire, brought down by the name Kyle. He named his daughter Libertas… at least the future heir won’t share the same disgraceful fate, assuming she lives through the indignity of a father named Kyle.”

Harry withheld a laugh as best he could. “What’s the Mum’s name? Any better?”

Draco thought for a moment. “Quincy, I think. She comes from a good family—the Addamses of upstate New York. Weird family, but old and solid. I can’t believe she married someone named Kyle.”

“You know, Malfoy,” said Harry. “There _is_ more to a person than the name their parents gave them.”

“Sure, but imagine going through life as a Kyle. Be thankful your parents gave you a solid, British name, Potter. You could’ve been a Kyle. Or a Todd. Or a Jayden. Or a—”

“You like my name?” Harry asked, before Malfoy could insult anyone else.

Draco hesitated for a single millisecond—plenty long enough for Harry to notice. “It’s a respectable British name,” he repeated.

Harry smirked. “You like my name.”

Draco rolled his eyes. “Of all the things you could latch onto…” he muttered.

“I could latch on to several things,” Harry said, leaning forward. “But right now, I’m thinking of that time, last year. We were in your office—”

“Which was so many times,” Draco interrupted.

“It was the time McGonagall barged in to tell you off for making Augusta-Alice Longbottom cry, and you—”

“How was I supposed to know that a first year Slytherin couldn’t handle a little constructive criticism—?”

“You told her it was a wonder her dad had lived long enough to sire her,” Harry reminded him.

Draco smirked, and Harry realised at once that he’d been purposefully led astray. He narrowed his eyes, felt his body heat up with a weird desire at being one-upped.

“Anyway, that time, I was there, and when the Headmistress came in, she caught sight of me and remember how she put her hand to her chest? Like she was so startled that I could possibly be there that she thought her heart was going to fail her?”

“And thank Merlin it didn’t,” Draco said. “Because I’d just asked for a pay rise the week before and she hadn’t signed off on it yet.”

“Shut up, Draco,” Harry said, startling them both with the use of Malfoy’s first name. He swallowed, his heart beating wildly, and said, “I’d been watching you brew all day, listening to you talk shit about Ron and Hermione’s marriage—which, I guess, you were kind of right about, but for _totally_ the wrong reason—and when she came in, and started telling you off, I watched you. You weren’t bothered at all. You _enjoyed_ it. You like being countered. You like being _put in your place_.”

“I do not!” Draco said. He leant forward angrily.

Harry stood, pushed his stool back. Leaning forward a bit, he smirked. “You do.”

“How dare you, Pott—” Draco began.

Harry kissed him.

Draco inhaled quickly, shocked. Then he pressed forward, kissing Harry hard. Harry grabbed Draco’s collar and pulled him in. He climbed up on the table to reach Draco better and felt his stomach twist in anticipation when Draco followed him up. They stood kneeling against one another on the wood, their chests heaving with quick breaths, and Harry tasting the Firewhisky-hot taste of Draco’s mouth for the first time.

He pushed him down against the table and climbed on top of him. That Draco went down easily felt extraordinarily _right_ in that moment. Beneath him, Draco was already hard, and it surprised a moan out of Harry. He undulated his hips, felt Draco react to it, join the rhythm of it, until they were grinding themselves together in harmony. 

Harry made a tiny sound, draped himself over Draco, and kissed him thoroughly. “I’ve been wanting this with you so long,” he gasped. “Like, twelve years long.”

Draco laughed breathily. “Liar. You’ve never been that patient.”

“Shows what you know,” Harry replied before pressing in to kiss him again. His fingers tangled in Draco’s hair, and yes, it was just as soft as water, just like he’d suspected. It flowed through his fingers like a stream, cool and soft to the touch.

Draco’s hands found his bum, pulled his hips in closer. Harry moaned into his mouth as delicious little tingles travelled over his body. And then Draco’s hands were moving down, inwards, scrabbling at the button of his fly. Harry lifted his hips to help him, and by Merlin, Draco was a talented fuck, because he had Harry’s fly open, zip down, and jeans pushed halfway down his thighs before Harry even realised what was going on.

He reached in to help Draco with his own, but he batted Harry’s hand away. Probably for the best. Harry’s hands were shaking with desire and he was no use to anyone with a whole row of buttons doing up their trousers. Draco shimmied his trousers down, his motions jerky and urgent, and then he pressed upwards touching himself to Harry, and Harry’s eyes fluttered shut at the sensation.

_It was really happening._

He found himself grinning, like a complete sap. Or a complete idiot. He wasn’t sure and he didn’t care. 

Draco rubbed against him, pulled Harry’s bum down, bringing them closer. “Merlin, you feel good,” he rasped against Harry’s mouth.

Harry mewled in response. And that settled it. He was both a sap and an idiot. He grinded his hips against Draco’s as he kissed him again, as if he couldn’t get enough, and truly, he couldn’t. He dreamed about this day for so long he’d stopped tracking the time. Always, it’d been an impossible fae story. Even now, it felt impossible, felt nostalgic and magical like a fae story, felt like it was undoing him completely.

Heat was crawling up into his belly, sharpening the overwhelming punch of euphoria he felt with each thrust. He was walking the edge, each slide of their bodies threatening to push him over. Draco’s length was leaking against his stomach, so hot from blood it felt like melted wax against him. Harry pulled back from their kiss, his mouth slick and hot, and Draco threw his head back. 

His pale neck was flushed red, his pulse pounding in his carotid in time with their frenetic thrusts. Draco’s fingers dug into Harry’s hips, holding them together. 

“I’m—” Draco panted. “I’m so close.”

“Come,” Harry said. He bent to suck at Draco’s pulse, felt Draco’s fingers clench his hips at the demand. “I want to feel you come,” Harry said. “Do it.”

Draco whined. “Please,” he said.

“Yeah, do it, Malfoy,” Harry panted. “Do it. Come for me.”

Then Draco surged upwards, his fingers tightening on Harry’s hips, and hot come poured out of him, soaking Harry’s belly. That was all it took for Harry to follow him over the edge. He emptied himself on Draco in one hard thrust, and they rode out the aftershocks together, their hips slowing until they stopped, breathing heavily.

Harry collapsed on top of Draco, breathing heavily. Draco’s hair fluttered against his nose every time he inhaled, which was both annoying and also something Harry could get used to absurdly easily. Draco’s hands slip up from his hips to drape over his back. They lay there atop the old Grimmauld Place dining table cum work table, catching their breaths.

“Your seahorse is glaring at us,” Draco observed.

Harry lifted his head to peer at the tank. Bikki was indeed at the front of his tank wearing a very dour expression. “Seabiscuit, stop.” The seahorse flicked his tail and swam into his castle. 

Harry collapsed down again. “I think I’ll take a nap,” he said. 

Draco snorted. “Not before you _Scourgify_ us. I won’t spend the rest of my life with our dicks glued together.”

“Why not?” asked Harry. “Sounds great to me.” 

He yawned, feeling a delicious sort of sleepiness come over him. He was definitely going to sleep better tonight than he had this past week. 

Draco snorted again. “Come on, Harry,” he said softly. “We have to clean up.”

Harry tried not to react to the use of his first name, but he did grin against Draco’s hair. Maybe America wasn’t so bad after all. “Alright, alright.”

He levered himself up, grimacing at the feel of sticky come, rapidly cooling in the air as he peeled them apart. A quick _Scourgify_ and they were both sparkling clean again, although, his skin always felt rather dry after a cleaning spell. Harry hopped down from the table to grab his jeans. He tossed Draco’s pants and trousers to him as he shimmied back into his own. 

“Can you stay?” he asked.

Draco sat up and started getting dressed before he answered. “For a bit, maybe,” he finally said. “Blaise will die if I’m not there when he wakes up.

“He’s awfully protective,” Harry observed, casually. He turned to find his Harpies t-shirt, forcing himself not to look over-interested.

“We’ve been through rather a lot together,” said Draco. There was no inflection to it, and Harry couldn’t gather what that meant. He was pretty sure Blaise and Malfoy didn’t sleep together, but… well, pureblooded wizards could be rather... Ancient Greek. There was really no telling. 

“Right,” said Harry. “You, uh, you want something to eat? I’ve got some mince pies in the icebox I could heat up. Mrs Weasley made them for me before I left, so they’ll actually taste good.”

Draco stared at him for a moment, his fingers pausing as they did up the last couple of buttons on his shirt. He blinked. “Sure, yeah.”

Harry grinned at him. “Great, come on!” 

The kitchen was on the ground floor now, taking up the back corner where the library had once been and flowing into an open living and dining area that gave lots more light than the original floorplan had allowed. Harry had converted the whole thing into a single room, taken out the mouldy house elf heads and burnt them in a garden bonfire along with the dining room table, a curio cabinet he couldn’t unlock, the rugs, the curtains, and two books, both of which had attacked him in his sleep when he’d nodded off in the library. 

(The rest of the books he gave to Hermione, minus three he’d found on water myths, two on water-based potions, two on blood magic that had kept him up for several nights as he tried to learn more about his mother’s sacrifice, and one, oddly enough, on Muggle Chemistry written by Isaac Newton.)

They had to pass through the living area to get to the kitchen, and the carefully repaired tapestry hanging above the settee. It was framed now and the line had been expanded. Dorea Black now properly showed her marriage to Charlus Potter, and Charlus Potter’s son, James, was now connected to Lily Evans, and perhaps it had been a little narcissistic of him, but the tapestry also now showed a single child thereof: Harry. He’d had a Master Spell-weaver fix and finish the tapestry for him some years ago, and it now hung proudly on his wall. This was his family, and the heritage he’d adopted, and it was how he felt grounded to the world.

But he also knew that the other tail of that tapestry showed another name: Draco’s. Together, they were the two dangling ends of a dynasty, and there had to be something to that.

Harry tried to slide by without making much of it, but he knew Draco, so he wasn’t surprised when Malfoy stopped abruptly before the tapestry. Harry paused at the icebox, and looked back at him. He was staring at the tapestry, so close to the threads that his nose nearly touched, and one hand hovered above his mother’s name as if he’d touch it.

“Malfoy?” said Harry.

Draco glanced at him, then back to the tapestry. “You fixed it?” he said. He hesitated for a moment and then added, “Mother’s name melted off of ours towards the end of the War. And then mine, and finally Father’s. Ours is one big, woven mess of thread beneath an otherwise distinguished family history.”

This was news to Harry. He swallowed. “I guess it’s a good thing Voldemort never saw your tapestry, huh? He probably would have figured you and your Mum out.”

“He did see it,” said Draco. “That’s why Mother’s hands shake now after too much exercise. Nerve damage.”

Well. “Fuck,” said Harry.

Draco looked to him, his lips twitching. “Yes, that about sums it up.” He straightened, and took a step towards Harry, and the lab. “Well, about that mince pie?”

“Sit down,” Harry said again, nodding towards the breakfast table. “I’ll heat some up.” 

He caught sight of the microwave when he passed and grimaced. It was nearly midnight. Hermione was bound to be up at first light banging on the lid of his trunk to get him up and working. Ah, well. It was worth it. He turned the oven on and selected a couple of pies from the icebox. Then he grabbed the kettle and poured in some fresh water from his wand, rather than the over-chlorinated sludge that came from the tap. The oven chirped that it was ready. Harry slid in two pies and pulled down some cups from the cupboard.

“You’re as efficient as an elf in there, Potter,” Draco observed. 

Harry kept his back to Draco as he worked. “Yeah. Lots of practice these days.”

“The bachelor life?” asked Draco, without inflection.

Harry grinned despite himself as he dumped tea into the cups. “Yes, Kreacher, my house-elf, had this kitchen very well organised, but he... died a few months back. So I’ve had to learn how to be an adult again.”

“I see.”

The kettle whistled—and if it was quicker thanks to a whispered spell from Harry, well… Harry poured it over the tea. He checked the oven and the pies were warmed up and golden brown. 

“Need help?”

“No, I’ve got it,” he said. Harry levitated the tea set over to the table while he plated the pies. He took a deep breath and made his way over to the table. Now that it was all over, he was starting to feel rather… exposed. He set a pie down in front of Draco and then another at the seat diagonal from him. He took probably too long pouring the tea and fixing it how Draco always took it at Hogwarts before sitting down himself.

“Fuck, I forgot forks. Be right back.” 

He hopped up and grabbed them, which did not take enough time at all. Then he was back in his chair, cutting into his pie and giving Draco a bland host-y sort of smile. They ate in silence for a few minutes. 

_Not uncomfortable at all_ , Harry thought dryly.

The silence continued. Harry took a bite, chewed, swallowed.

“So, you’re into men,” he said.

Draco choked. Harry stared at him in horror, but he waved him off and soon had his throat cleared. 

“Sometimes,” Draco agreed. 

Harry nodded sagely. “Me, too. Almost all times.”

Draco rolled his eyes. “No shit, Potter.”

“A bit obvious?” Harry asked, grinning. He took a sip of tea. “I’m pants at this sort of thing. The after part. What do you say to someone you just got off with?”

“I don’t know… ‘fancy a date?’”

Harry inhaled sharply. Fortunately, he didn’t have food in his mouth. “Would you?” 

Draco stared at him. Harry quickly continued: “I told Mrs Black I’d take her to the Smithsonian.”

“Which one? There’re a dozen of them.”

“The art one, obviously,” Harry said. “Do you really think Mrs Black would give a single fuck about aerospace or Native American history?”

“Probably not, no,” Draco agreed. “Alright, I’ll go with you.”

Harry beamed. “Say it.”

“Say what?” Draco asked.

Harry leaned in. “Say ‘It’s a date, Harry.’”

“I will not,” Draco said.

“Say it,” Harry repeated, grinning. “Admit you’re going on a date with me.”

“I shan’t!”

“You shall,” Harry sang. “Or else I’ll tell Hermione about the face you make when you—”

“You horrendous cretin!” Draco said.

Harry smiled.

“It _was_ a date before you annoyed me, and now it’s only a fake date because I’m being blackmailed.”

Harry waited patiently.

“Fine! It’s a date, Potter.”

“Good enough,” Harry decided. He finished off his tea. “Fancy another round upstairs before we turn in? On a bed this time?”

“Oh, very well,” Draco said, sighing. 

_Poor lad_ , Harry thought as he led him up to his bedroom. He was always so hard-done by.

-x-


	7. Chapter 7: Mrs Black, a Smithsonian, & Draco’s Nightmare

The next morning, Harry was alone in his trunk, though he had to admit he hadn’t really expected much different. Harry rolled over and checked the clock. It was after nine. Suspiciously, Hermione had not yelled down at him to wake up yet. 

He decided to take the extra time to get a few more tests going on the samples he’d collected in the Bay yesterday. Still yawning, he shuffled down to his lab, fed Seabiscuit, and got the tests going. He was about to head up when he remembered that he’d promised to bring his seahorse up to the kitchen for a better view. 

So he grabbed Bikki’s tank and hauled him up the four flights to the attic, then had to figure out how to carry a fish tank under one arm while he ascended a ladder. The castle fell over and sent pink gravel floating in all directions. Seabiscuit was _not_ pleased.

Harry climbed out of the trunk into his bedroom at the Airbnb and changed into some fresh clothes, brushed his teeth, and was about to go downstairs when he heard voices. Voices that belonged to people other than Hermione and Lee. Malfoy and the others were already there.

Why hadn’t she woken him up? Eyes narrowed, Harry took the stairs two at a time to the bottom and hopped off. 

“Finally awake?” Lee called from the breakfast nook.

“Fuck off, morning person,” Harry said. “I had a late night.”

“I’m sure,” Hermione said, dryly. She was seated next to Padma, both poring over a map of the United States while lovely-smelling coffee steamed in mugs before them. 

Harry manfully refrained from turning bright red.

Blaise and Lee were across from them, crunching on jammy toast and watching highlights from the Juventus FC game on the kitchen telly. _Who needed a kitchen telly?_ Harry wondered. Muggles, he supposed. The Dursleys had had one, now that he thought about it.

“Good morning, Potter.”

Harry acted completely natural. Draco was by the Keurig, and both he and Narcissa had full cups of steaming coffee in their hands, and no spills on the countertops, so Harry was forced to consider the possibility that Draco Malfoy had learnt to use a Muggle coffee maker faster than he had.

“Morning, Malfoy, Mrs Malfoy.”

He set Seabiscuit’s tank on the kitchen island, next to Mrs Black’s portrait.

“You look so refreshed this morning, Mr Potter,” said Narcissa, sipping her coffee. “The lie-in has done you good.”

Harry cleared his throat. “Yes, thank you. You know how Portkey-lag is.”

She didn’t look convinced. “Quite.”

For some reason, Harry couldn’t quite stop looking at Draco. It was like Draco was a different person now, after last night. For all the years of his crush, and the years following when he’d realised he was stupidly in love with him, Harry had never been unable to look away from Draco. He’d always been something wanted, kind of needed, but who just wasn’t possible.

But last night, he’d been _very_ possible. 

And now, Harry _wanted_ in ways he’d never even thought to want before. The attachment and emotional yearning he’d had sewn into his body for so long was pulling the thread taut and Harry realised then how absolutely fucked he was.

“Since you’re awake, Harry,” said Lee, as ESPN went to advertisement, “We thought we’d get started on a plan.”

Harry jerked his attention away from Draco. “Yeah, good. Let me get some coffee and I’ll join you.”

Draco slid by him to sit at the table, his body coming entirely too close for propriety. The flirty fuck. He was trying to rile Harry up. Mrs Malfoy followed at a more decorous distance, and perched at the end seat. He tried to imagine her in an Uber and couldn’t. They must have walked.

“Hermione and I have been looking up the locations of all the major tribes,” said Padma. “We think it would be a good idea to visit each of them, to make sure we have a full understanding of their concerns so we can create a comprehensive plan of action.”

“But we can’t just spend a month on research,” said Lee. He’d muted the telly, though Juve still played on the screen, stealing his and Blaise’s focus every few moments. “They’re dying down there. We need to get started on fixing it _now_.”

“I know,” Hermione said, chewing her lip. “But it still needs to be done.”

“Potter and I have another concern,” Draco spoke up, startling Harry into spilling some coffee from his cup just as he was pulling it from the Keurig. 

“Right,” said Lee. “The Murdoch thing.”

Draco nodded once. “We need to maintain a delicate balance.”

The only seat left was next to Draco. Harry took it nonchalantly. 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Padma, eyebrow raised. “We have a business to run, Draco. We can’t just dally in the MUS forever trying to find some weird Slytherin balance.”

Draco ignored her.

“I would be livid if I was getting sick because of something another species was doing,” Blaise said, lip curled. “I would be doing a _lot_ more than rioting and flipping kayakers. I can’t blame them for that Muggle ship, really.”

“I imagine the Mers would, too, if they could walk,” Malfoy said.

“Wizards are known to banish rubbish to the sea,” Padma said, gently pulling them back on track. “There’s lots of trash floating out there.” 

Hermione’s mouth twisted wryly. “As much as I hate to say it, Muggles do it far more.”

“Then one might naturally conclude that the avenue of choice is to speak to Muggles, not wizards,” said Narcissa.

“Yes,” said Lee, frowning. “I was afraid of that.”

“Aren’t you an award-winning mediator?” asked Blaise.

“Yes, in Magical Europe, population 400,000. There are more than 400,000 Muggles in this city alone.”

That put a damper on things. 

“Well, needs must,” Hermione said. “We owe it to them. We caused their problems.”

“It’s not just rubbish floating in the water, though,” Harry said. “I took a sample and tested it last night. The water in the bay is full of a particular strain of algae that thrives on petrochemicals. The algae eats the chemicals and blooms, and that soaks up all the oxygen, which is why they’re drowning down there. We have to get the chemicals out, too, which is much trickier. And then we have to keep the Muggles from dumping them again.”

Hermione was typing furiously on her tablet. She paused, her eyes scanning the search result, and then frowned. “It says here that the Chesapeake Bay is the designated waste dump for a number of agriculture and manufacturing businesses.”

“How did you use that Google so fast?” asked Lee.

Hermione rolled her eyes, continued talking, her voice raising in pitch with each sentence: “Oh my god. The Tyson’s Chicken plant dumps _18 million pounds of toxic chemicals_ into the water every year. The US Muggle Army dumps _untreated wastewater tainted with explosives debris_ into the water above Baltimore Harbour. And here… _the sewage treatment plant at Easton spills out human waste that has been crudely treated in two slimy, green lagoons._ Gross!”

“We swam in that?!” Padma said.

Blaise looked as though he’d vomit. He was wiping at his arms as if he could get off more of the bay water from his skin.

Hermione went on: “It says that the Clean Water Act was supposed to curb this, but that Muggles are violating it regularly without reprimand. The water’s full of ammonia, cyanide, and chlorine! No wonder everything’s dying!”

“I didn’t check for cyanide,” Harry admitted. “I didn’t expect that. I need to go back and re-test for the hard chemicals. If there’s cyanide, it’s worse than I thought.”

“Can we fix that?” asked Lee.

“On a small scale, maybe,” said Draco, frowning. “I could develop a potion that would neutralise the chemicals Potter tells me to neutralise, but I could only concentrate it enough to treat a single megalitre. There must be at least 60,000 megalitres in the bay.”

Hermione typed quickly. “18 trillion gallons, so… 68,137 megalitres. Close, Malfoy.”

“It would take millions of galleons just to buy the supplies for that much water. And likely several years to brew enough. Just for this one area.”

“We can ask for funding,” Harry offered. 

“We’ll have to,” said Malfoy. “I can put down a thousand galleons. Potter will match me.”

“Yeah, sure,” Harry said. 

“So that’s two grand… probably enough for five or ten batches, right Draco?” said Padma.

Draco nodded, shrugged. “Hard to say without knowing exactly what chemicals we need to treat, but… probably. We can clean just this one area as proof that it can be done and that fulfills our obligation.”

“But the other Nations are suffering, too, Malfoy,” said Hermione. We can’t fix one area and not the other. It’s not right.”

“Neither is blackmail,” said Draco, shrugging.

Hermione looked furious. “We’re helping _all_ of them.”

“Okay, but more importantly,” said Blaise. “We need to ensure that _if_ we clean this water, it doesn’t get fucked up again. Which means that we’ve got to work with the Muggles.”

“NoMajes,” said Lee, Padma, and Hermione. Harry didn’t bother to point out that they’d all been using the word, too. He shared a smirk with Draco.

“If I may,” said Narcissa, speaking up for the first time. “The American branch of our family works in politics. Draco, I really must insist that you reach out to your cousin Kyle.”

“ _Kyle_?” Hermione whispered to Harry. He shrugged.

“Mother…” Draco whined.

“Draco, this is too important. He can’t help the name he was given.”

“He can help calling me ‘dude,’” Malfoy said.

“Draco,” Narcissa said sternly.

“Fine, Mother!” Draco snapped. He pulled out his mobile and tapped furiously on the screen. Harry raised his eyebrows. Draco certainly looked as though he was well-used to such a device. Draco tapped once more and his mobile made a sound like a musical slide. 

“There. Sent.” Draco started to put his phone away but it made a tinkling sound almost immediately. Draco’s frown became infinitely more pronounced. Harry burst out laughing.

“Potter, shut the fuck up,” said Draco. He tapped his screen and read the message aloud. “‘Dude! Hey!’ it reads. ‘So cool to hear from you! I’m in NYC right now but I’ll Apparate down this afternoon. It’s been a minute since I’ve seen you! Of course I want to help!’ My god, I have never used that many exclamation points in my entire life, and he fit them into a single text message.”

Harry suspected that he could get Draco to use that many exclamation points, but refrained from saying so.

“So if you go meet with Kyle this afternoon,” said Padma, “Hermione and I could pop over to see if we can get an impromptu audience with the Gulf Water Nation, the United Seas of the Pacific Nation, the Salt Lake Sirens, and the Great Lakes Ladies. Between us, we can speak all of the dialects. And that covers the major Mer tribes on MUS soil, er, water, and should give us a good idea of what we should prioritise.”

“Fine,” Draco said, sighing. 

“Then that leaves me and Blaise,” said Lee. “It looks like we’ll be trying to negotiate a way to prevent reoccurrence with the Mu—NoMajes. We should call Kennedy Jones and see who she can put us in front of.”

“I would like to join you for that,” Narcissa said primly. “I’m sure I can offer something to help.”

Draco grimaced. 

“I’m sure,” Blaise said, smirking at Draco. 

“What about me?” asked Harry. 

“Go with Malfoy,” Padma said. “You’ll be able to explain any of the Muggle chemicals that he can’t.”

Harry tried not to look too excited. “I can do that.”

“Good,” said Hermione. She folded her map up and tucked it into her jeans pocket. She let out a long breath. “It feels good to have a plan.”

Padma smiled at her. “ _Really_ good.”

Harry’s brow wrinkled. There was something weird going on there. It was good, but not _that_ good. Whatever. He finished off his coffee and pushed back from the table. “Well, since I’ve got to wait until Malfoy’s cousin gets in, I’m going to take Mrs Black to the Smithsonian. Malfoy? Coming?”

Draco stood. “Yes, of course. I should spend some time with Aunt Wally while I can.”

“Your commitment to family gratifies me, Draco,” Narcissa said and no one would have been able to hear the sarcasm in her voice, but Harry, who lived a life in sarcasm, did. 

He smirked at Draco as he passed him on the way out the kitchen. He had to get Mrs Black and find his shoes. They were probably still in his trunk, beside his bed, where he’d woken up alone after two rounds of sex and passing out naked next to Draco Malfoy.

-x-

Mrs Black decided she didn’t want to go to the Smithsonian, after all. She wanted the National Portrait Gallery.

It was only a thirty-minute walk from Harry’s Airbnb to the National Portrait Gallery, and it took them right by the White House, so they decided to walk instead of taking the train.

“I still don’t see why you’re so interested in the portraits, Mrs Black,” Harry said to his inside pocket as he and Draco walked along. “They’re all going to be still. The Sackler Gallery has Asian art… loads of dragons.”

“And the ancient Egyptian art, too,” Draco added. “I thought you liked sphinxes.”

“It’s my excursion and we’ll go where I want to go,” came her muffled voice. “I need give you no explanation.”

“Right, of course,” Harry said, rolling his eyes. 

He’d had to put on a summer jacket and shrink Mrs Black’s frame so he could stick her in an inside pocket and not look like a crazy person walking through the city with a large, rude oil painting under one arm. 

Taking this stroll with Draco was… interesting. There were other people, sunlight, and fresh air, so it was nothing like the time he’d spent with Malfoy when he was teaching Potions at Hogwarts. But it still felt… nice. It felt the same, but nicer, Harry supposed. 

There was a Danish concept: _hygge_. It meant cosiness and people you liked or something. Harry felt like it applied here.

Why had he never said anything to Draco before? Last night had come so… easily, almost. Was it just being on another continent that made all one’s worries feel far away? Was it the Bubblehead Charm? Was it an emotional response to the Chieftess’s story?

“Malfoy…” said Harry.

Draco cut his eyes to him. He was starting to glisten from the heat. It reminded Harry of a Veela… or maybe he was just still in love. 

“Mm?”

“I was just thinking,” said Harry. He swerved to avoid a sweaty Muggle in a suit passing in the opposite direction. “Why did you sell me litmus strips?”

“Because overcharging you was a good way to pad my student storeroom budget.”

They turned to stare at the White House, or what they were pretty sure was the White House (there were a lot of large, white buildings here, after all), as they walked past. It was sort of interesting, Harry supposed. There was a small lawn, rather closer to the street than Harry would have expected. And some of those Muggles looked like they would kill him if he lingered overlong.

“Right, right,” said Harry, turning forward. “But that first time… when I Owled you and asked if you knew where I could get litmus strips. Remember that?”

“Obviously,” said Draco, rolling his eyes. 

“You told me I could come buy some from you.”

“I saw a business opportunity and I took it,” said Draco.

“Yeah, but you could’ve just Owled me some.”

Draco’s mouth snapped shut and he stared resolutely forward. Harry readjusted Mrs Black’s portrait inside his linen blazer. Her frame kept digging into his ribs. 

He licked his lip, said hesitantly: “I was just thinking… maybe I wasn’t the only one who’d wanted to see the other person then.”

Draco’s head turned to him so quickly Harry winced in sympathy. “What do you mean?” said Draco.

Harry shrugged. “It was a couple years after the war, remember? And I’d been wondering how you were… if you liked teaching. I guess I kind of… missed you.”

“Or you wanted to see if I was up to no good,” Draco said, eyes narrowed.

“No, I swear it,” said Harry. He felt his face heat from more than the August heat. “I just kinda wanted to see you.”

Draco swallowed. “I will admit that I had a certain… curiosity,” he finally said.

Harry beamed, then bit his lip to try to tone it down, but it was no use. “Yeah?” 

Draco only rolled his eyes.

Harry grabbed his elbow and pulled him off the pavement, into the grass. “Look, Malfoy… Draco,” Harry said. “I really liked getting slutty with you last night. A lot. But I have to be stupidly Gryffindor right now and tell you I want you for more than that. I _have_ wanted you for more than that.”

Draco narrowed his eyes. “Which is why you stopped coming around as soon as you figured out Amazon UK.”

“I stopped coming around because I figured out I wanted you,” said Harry. “I realised I had been… courting you, without even knowing it. For like, eight years. And if I’d been coming to your office once or twice a month for eight years, and we hadn’t even so much as gone for a drink together, then I was probably out of luck. I stopped coming around because I didn’t want to fuck up and show it to you, and ruin what had turned into a pretty nice enemyship.”

“What the fuck is an enemyship?”

“It’s like a friendship, but with your enemy.”

“Of course it is,” Draco said, huffing. He crossed his arms. “So you’re telling me that you came to see me every month because you liked our enemyship and then when you realised you wanted to rut against me, you decided to stop coming ‘round.”

“No way,” said Harry. “I’d wanted to rut against you since sixth year—” Draco’s eyebrows soared “—but I kept it pretty well in check. It wasn’t until I realised I wanted… _more_ than to rut against you that I signed up for Prime.”

Draco stared at him for several long moments. Dozens of political Muggles passed by them on their mobiles. Dozens more tourist Muggles did the same, holding up iPads to take photos of the Eisenhower Building, which Harry had mistakenly thought was the White House until this very moment when he saw the plaque. The White House was next door. 

“Potter,” Draco finally said.

Harry gave him his full attention.

“Potter…” Draco said again.

“Yes?”

“Why do you do everything in your life completely arse-backwards?”

“I’m not sure what you—?”

“Really, Potter!” Draco snapped. “You spent eight sodding years wanting to fuck me and never once sent a clue, and then you decided, Merlin forbid, you actually _liked_ me, and then choose to scarper for three sodding years. And _then_ , after being reunited with me for less than a week in the fucking United States of Arseholes, you hump me on a kitchen table without so much as a by your leave! Do you not see anything wrong with this? Does _anything_ about that sound _abnormal_ to you?”

“Your accent sounds abnormal to me!” a passing Muggle teen yelled.

Draco turned to give him a withering look. “Fuck off, Muggle.”

The Muggle and his teen friends cackled, though in a confused manner, and Draco returned to Harry. 

“He thought you were a mugger, bro!” one teen laughed. 

Draco pursed his lips.

“Careful, Tyler!” the Muggle’s friend said. “He might hump you on a kitchen table!”

“That was the other one, Lyndon! That one’s just going to _get_ humped on the table!”

Draco’s eyes were so narrowed Harry wasn’t entirely sure he could still see.

“Muggles are the worst, huh?” Harry said, sympathetically.

“They certainly are!” came an oily voice from within Harry’s jacket. 

“I hate everyone,” said Draco. He spun and continued walking towards the art gallery, which Harry _thought_ was just a few blocks away, but he had also been confused about which building was the White House.

“You never actually said if you wanted to see me back then,” Harry said, jogging to keep up. 

“I didn’t mind your presence,” Draco said.

“So you did want to see me,” Harry surmised.

“I said I didn’t _mind—_ ”

“Yeah, but people like you always beat around the puffskein like that.”

“People like me?” said Draco, still walking very quickly.

Harry shrugged. He was fine with a brisk pace. “I didn’t want to say ‘Slytherins’ because I’m thirty years old, but I meant Slytherins.”

“Of course you did,” Draco sighed.

“I’m glad we got this sorted,” Harry said. “I really liked getting you off last night, and so far I like going on a date with you, and I’m really into the idea of getting off with you again tonight, solving the Mers’ problems, and telling Minister Murdoch to go fuck himself while standing next to you in a sharp suit.”

“Have you really planned out the rest of our lives together, Potter?” Draco did not sound particularly enthused.

“I figured I had to be the one to do it, if it was going to get done,” Harry agreed. “You know how you people are.”

“Merlin,” Draco said to the sky. “I beg you. Save me. I promise to be good.”

Harry began to whistle. So far, he was really liking America.

-x-

Mrs Black expertly maneuvered them through the portraits, skipping entirely the folk art sections, the special exhibitions, and the Origins of America wing. She insisted they go straight to the upper floor, where the politicians were on view.

“No… no... keep going,” she said, as they wandered through. 

“Aunt Wally,” Draco whispered, “There are some lovely portraits here. Potter and I want to look, too.”

“You may look afterwards, Draco,” she said. “Mr Potter, keep moving.”

Harry sighed, and continued his tour through the wing, carefully letting Mrs Black peek out from his summer jacket. It was too hot even with just the linen, but he hadn’t been able to hide her sufficiently otherwise. They travelled through several more rooms before Mrs Black hissed, “Stop!”

Harry and Draco glanced around. Muggles were giving them annoyed looks. He shrugged and pointed to Draco, who gave him a withering look. The Muggles returned to their own portrait viewing. Harry turned to face the portrait nearest them and Mrs Black stood on tiptoes to see better.

“It _is_ you!” she said—thankfully, quietly this time. Harry erected a silencing spell around them anyway. “Hugo Black, you scoundrel!”

The portrait, previously still, seemed to tense even further. Slowly—very, very slowly—the portrait’s eyes moved down, down, down, until they settled on the corner of Mrs Black’s miniaturized frame that was peeking out of Harry’s jacket. The man’s eyes widened, and he glanced quickly around. The room had cleared of Muggles and they were alone.

“Walburga?” the portrait whispered. His voice came out croaky, as if he hadn’t spoken in many years. He was done in watercolour and his slow, southern drawl seemed to make his mouth flow when he spoke. “Is that you?”

“In the oil!” she said angrily. “How dare you, Hugo Black? _How dare you!_ ”

“Mrs Black, keep it down,” Harry hissed. Her screeches were known to cut through a Silencing charm.

“I wrote!” said the portrait. “I swear it!”

“So you did!” she said, and Harry heard the sound of parchment fluttering. He pulled her portrait out and craned his neck over the frame. She was waving the very same letter she always read when she was annoyed with him. “I’ve the letter right here! ‘Dear Wally,’ you write. ‘I regret to inform you that I have been appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States and must serve my country, therefore I shan’t be returning to London for our wedding. All the best, cousin Hugo.’”

Harry and Draco gasped, then glared at the watercolour portrait.

“You stood up Mrs Black?” Harry demanded. “How dare you?”

“I was appointed to the Supreme Court!” the portrait insisted. “It was my duty!”

“You could have brought Aunt Wally to America with you,” Draco reprimanded him. “That was very unbecoming. And am I to understand I’m related to you?”

“Hugo was my fourth cousin,” Mrs Black said. “I was forced to marry my first cousin, Orion, when Hugo called off our wedding. He drove me _mad_. He gave my children traits they’d have done better without!”

“I was much too old for you, my love!” Hugo insisted. “You were a flower barely blooming, and I was thirty-nine years your senior with one wife in the ground… You deserved better.”

“And Orion Black was _better_?” she hissed. “That man who beat me like a _Muggle_ and killed my daughters?”

“You had daughters?” Harry asked, shocked. 

“Three,” she said sharply. “Before Sirius was born. Auva, Zaniah, and Syrma. My husband sacrificed them to strengthen the wards of our house. He was prideful and ignorant. He didn’t use dark magic _properly_ and it rebounded on all of us. There was more dark magic in those acts than most dark wizards are exposed to in a lifetime. It overran our home and our minds, filled me with never-ending rage, made our boys reckless. It brought out all of our worst traits.” 

She paused, swallowing. Then, sharply, she added: “And you, Hugo Black! You left me to that fate!”

The portrait of Hugo Black stared at her, his mouth hanging open. “I never knew—”

Suddenly, there were footsteps behind them, and Hugo jerked back into his Muggle pose. He was smiling in the painting, but it didn’t look real anymore. Harry tucked Mrs Black back into his jacket, still staring at Hugo. This man was the reason she was crazy—maybe not the reason she was so bigoted, but at least the reason she couldn’t keep her mouth shut about it in polite company and the reason she’d treated Sirius so badly. He felt his lip curling up in disgust. 

“You betrayed my family name,” Draco hissed. The portrait tensed further, his smile caving in at the edges. “You don’t deserve the name Black.”

Then, without another word, Draco turned and strode from the hall. Harry gave Hugo Black one last glare and followed him out. No one spoke again until they were outside in the hot sun once more. They took up a dejected sort of wander away from the museum, no destination in mind. Mrs Black had returned to her writing desk, but she stared off to the side of her portrait, her face tensed sadly. 

Harry Silenced her frame so she couldn’t hear him or Draco and they couldn’t hear her. She looked like she needed a minute. Harry actually wanted to see the Freer Gallery, so he maneuvered them that way.

“Well, that was a nice time,” Harry said, eventually.

Draco snorted. “By whose standards?”

“I dunno,” Harry said. “Voldemort’s maybe.”

Draco grimaced. “I know he’s dead, but it still stings when you say his name.” He gestured to the faded mark on his arm, disguised by a delicate floral sleeve winding all around it. 

“Weird. I wonder how he kept that magic going after his death.”

“My working theory remains that the Mark is a magical artefact, embedded in my skin, not a spell cast _on_ it. Or blood magic.”

“Why does that matter?” asked Harry.

Draco rolled his eyes. “Because both of those can continue past the caster’s death and they can bind to a specific magical signature—which I’m almost certain was true since He was able to call one of us at a time, when he wanted to.”

“Ever considered amputating your arm?” Harry asked, not entirely joking.

“Sometimes I wish Muggles were filming me like in that _Office_ show so I could look at a camera and share my thoughts on your stupidity with the world.”

“It’s NoMajes, actually.” Then, “How do you know about _The Office_?”

“Potter, I hate you.”

Harry bumped his shoulder to Draco’s. “You didn’t hate me last night. In fact, you—”

Draco’s mobile rang. It played _Danse Macabre_. He answered while still glaring at Harry. Harry put on as innocent a face as possible, modeled entirely after the face Teddy pulled when he’d been up to his worst shit-stirring. 

‘Kyle,’ Draco mouthed, curling his lip.

They crossed Constitution Avenue with a crowd of tourists. Some coming the other way, from the Mall, bumped into Draco, who was not accustomed to right-side walking. Probably most wizards weren’t—after all, one always wanted one’s wand hand to be closest to the potential enemy. The tourist tossed a map on the ground and Harry picked it up, annoyed. That map was going to end up in the water supply one day!

Draco rang off as they crossed the Mall. “He’s coming down now,” he said. “Apparently there’s an Inter-city Apparition point just inside the Smithsonian Castle.” 

“Oh, perfect,” Harry said, looking at his map. “That’s right there.” He pointed straight ahead. “Just by the... oh, how fortuitous… The Freer Sackler Art Gallery.”

“You’re not fooling anyone, Potter,” said Draco.

Harry shrugged. “When’s Kyle getting in?”

“Twenty minutes.”

“Bugger, that’s not enough time to see the gallery. D’you want to get something to eat from one of the food trucks?”

“The food-whats?” Draco asked, scandalised. 

Harry pointed to the line of Muggle lorries along the edge of the Mall. “They make food in those.”

Draco looked confused. “Did they use extension charms?”

“No idea!” Harry said, happily. “Look, this one sells Thai hot dogs. Let’s eat here.”

“Potter, none of those words sounded like food words.”

“If we get food poisoning,” Harry said reasonably, “you can just make us a potion for that.”

“No, I can’t,” Draco hissed. “Because I’d be vomiting everywhere and that would contaminate the potion!”

“Oh,” said Harry. He shrugged. “Well, I’ll make it then while you tell me what to do. Do you want a Pad Thai Dog or a Khao Soi Dog? You’re not allergic to eggs or nuts, right?”

“I’m allergic to you,” Draco muttered. He looked desperately around and his eyes landed on a truck two spaces down. “I want that one instead. Crêpes are always safe.”

Harry sighed. “Fine.” 

They got two crêpes from the Crêpe Love truck and sat down on a bench by the Smithsonian Castle to wait for Malfoy’s unexpectedly named cousin.

“I’m kind of still hungry,” Harry said. “I think I might get a Thai Dog…”

“Oh thank god,” Draco muttered, standing. And then, to himself, “Words I never thought I’d say in regards to Kyle’s arrival, and yet, I never considered my other option would be watching you eat a substandard sausage with noodles, peanuts, cilantro, and scrambled eggs on top.” 

Harry huffed.

Malfoy ignored him. Louder, he said, “Kyle!” and waved.

Harry saw him then, and would have choked on his hot dog if he’d been allowed to get one. The man striding purposefully towards them was what Draco would have looked like if he’d grown up as an American Muggle. He was tall and slender like Draco, and blond, too, but more of a dirty blond than Draco’s white blond. He smiled as if it wasn’t a strange concept to him—which it obviously was to Draco. 

But the best part was that his hair was shaved on the sides and long on top, stylishly coiffed to the side. He also had a full, dark blond beard and moustache. And he was wearing a t-shirt and jeans. Harry desperately wanted to see Draco in the same, now.

“Oh my god,” Harry said, as Kyle jogged over to them. “He looks so much like you!”

“We _are_ cousins, Potter,” Draco said through his teeth, still smiling in welcome to Kyle. 

“But he also looks so… so normal! So _American_ normal.”

“He _is_ American, unfortunately.”

“But the beard!”

Kyle arrived just then, still grinning as if it hurt him to close his mouth. “Draco, dude!” He pulled him into a manly hug, and then turned to Harry with his hand out. “Hey, man. Kyle Malfoy.”

“Harry Potter,” he said, grinning. Oh, he couldn’t wait to text Ron about this. He was going to have to get a picture of the two of them together to send to him, too.

“Cool, yeah I think I read about you in the paper a few years back. I dunno. I was like twenty then. Wasn’t really interested in world news at the time, you know?”

“Definitely,” said Harry. “It was really boring anyway.”

“Yeah? Bummer. So! You guys are here to solve some climate crisis, I guess? It’s really shitty over here. The Muggle government fights against it really hard, for like the stupidest reasons. It’s like they’re Nifflers with their heads in the sand looking for gold instead of noticing we got some pretty cool gold already. You should see the Adirondacks in the fall, man! If you’re still here, I’ll take you hiking for sure!”

“Yeah, sounds great,” Harry said, while ignoring the glare Draco was discreetly giving him. “It’s sort of climate change, but more water pollution. It’s killing off your Mers’ habitats.”

“Woah, that sucks! I really like those gals, too. Whenever I go out to LA to visit my sister, Taylor, I always try to catch a few waves with the ones over there. The Pacific Nation, I think. They’re real cool. So what are you gonna do to save them?”

“That’s why Mother suggested we get in touch with you,” Draco said. “She thought you might give us some insight on the political spectrum over here.”

Kyle was nodding along. “Yeah, for sure. I’m not working strictly with MACUSA politics now, though. I just took a job as a NoMaj Policy Liaison, so I’m lobbying deals between us, but I can give you a run-down.”

“That might be even better,” Harry said. “We’re thinking that to really solve the Mers’ problems, it’s going to require some changes in the Mug—er, NoMaj world, too.”

Kyle frowned. “That’s gonna be tough. The NoMajes over here don’t like being told what to do. Even when it would help them out.”

“Sounds like people everywhere,” Draco muttered.

“True, yeah,” said Kyle. “But the difference here is, we’ve got so many people spread so far out that we can never come to an agreement on anything. MACUSA’s been thinking of dividing itself up among the MUS… it’s just too big to govern, with too many regions wanting different things. I wish the US would do the same, to be honest. They’d all be happier if they were five or six different countries instead of one, but try telling them that.”

“Right. Anyway,” said Harry. “We should find a place to sit down and talk.”

“Oh, yeah! Have you guys eaten yet? There’s this food truck here that I always have to stop at when I come down. They sell Thai hot dogs. It’s the weirdest, coolest thing.”

“Motherfucker,” Draco whispered.

Harry elbowed him. “I saw it back there. Want to grab one?”

“I like this dude,” Kyle said to Draco, hooking his thumb in Harry’s direction. “He goes with the flow. You’d do great here in the MUS, Harry. Way less stuffy than England.”

Harry laughed. What could Draco possibly dislike about his cousin? He seemed great to Harry.


	8. Chapter 8: Many Words on Mers

That night, after they’d all returned from their missions, they gathered at Harry’s Airbnb. He went straight up to his room and then straight down to his lab to check on his tests. The results weren’t reassuring. Arsenic. Lithium. Ammonia. Cyanide. And about a dozen other chemicals Harry was nearly certain were from pesticides and pharmaceuticals. He’d have to test further to be sure.

One thing was certain: there wasn’t a drop of clean water in the Chesapeake Bay. It was worse than the Thames. 

He heard footsteps behind him and turned to find Draco standing in the doorway of his lab.

“Just invite yourself into my house, Malfoy, please,” Harry said.

“Thank you. You shouldn’t have left your trunk open.”

Harry rolled his eyes. Suddenly feeling weary, he pulled out a stool and slumped down at his worktable. There were two strips of litmus paper in front of him. One used to be blue. Both were now red. 

Draco came over and looked down. He stared at the litmus strips for a long time, then he pulled out a stool opposite Harry and sat. “You know, I developed a spell to give the exact pH of a liquid.”

“Of course you did,” said Harry. “When?”

Draco shrugged. “Oh, about eight years ago.”

Harry just stared at him. “And you never told me because you liked having me come around. I _knew_ it.”

“ _Molaritia_.” Draco snapped his wand at the litmus strips in turn. Two numbers materialised above them.

> 5.912
> 
> 6.377

“ _Wow_ ,” Draco said, eyebrows raised.

“I really wasn’t expecting it to be that low for saltwater,” Harry finished for him. “That’s like… impossibly low.”

“Can sea creatures live in water that acidic?” asked Draco.

“At around pH four,” said Harry, “it starts affecting their reproductive systems‚—fucks with hormones and so on. They’ll start actively dying from the water at around pH five. So we’re getting pretty close to a dangerous level.”

“What’s the pH of an ocean?”

Harry looked up at him. “Eight point one, globally. Used to be eight point two, but, you know, pollution.” 

“Fuck.”

Harry looked back down at his strips. One had been blue, and the other started red. They were both bright red on the ends now. “I took these samples from the shallower water near the shore. I tested a few more last night from deeper down. Those came out closer to neutral, but it’s still nowhere close to a healthy environment for saltwater creatures. It’s full of toxic shit. Literally.” He tipped his head to the workstation in the corner where results had come back high in human fecal matter.

“I’m really glad I drink from _Aguamenti_ ,” Draco observed at that point. “To be a Muggle…” He trailed off, shuddering.

“Draco,” Harry said, and Draco turned to him immediately. Harry swallowed. “There’s no fucking way we can fix this. There’s too much nitrogen and phosphate leading to algal blooms and sucking up all the oxygen, and on top of that, there’s fucking nasty arse chemicals.”

Draco’s face hardened. “We _will_ goddamn fix this, Potter. You pull on your big wizard pants and buck the fuck up. We’re going to fix this fucking water and Murdoch can suck my dick if he thinks he’ll get rid of me that easily.”

Harry straightened. Murdoch would be sucking Draco’s dick over Harry’s dead body. “Happy to buck up, Malfoy, but what the sodding fuck do you suggest we do? We can’t make enough potion to bring up the pH of the Bay even half a point by ourselves.”

Draco pursed his lips. “We’ll outsource.”

“To whom? China?”

“To the Mers, fuckface. And don’t ‘to whom’ me like you’re fucking Granger. We have a job to do and I won’t sit here listening to you play at proper English when you could be doing something useful like cleaning the fucking water.”

Harry rolled his eyes. “You do realise that the Mers live underwater, right? How are they going to brew a potion?”

“They had fire,” Draco reminded him.

Harry’s eyes widened. “That’s right! They did! How did they have fire? I still can’t figure that out!”

Draco shrugged. “Don’t care. All that matters is that they can boil a cauldron. And obviously, they can.”

“Hmm,” said Harry. This changed everything. If the Mers could brew their own potions, then all he and Draco had to do was develop it and test it. “Then, theoretically,” Harry continued aloud, “if the Mers were brewing and using the potion themselves, we… er, you could devise a water-cleaning potion that had an area of effect smaller than would be necessary if we just dumped potion into the Bay.”

Draco looked thoughtful, and also surprised that Harry had made him so. “Potter, that’s genius! Mediocre genius, at least.” He stood from the stool, began to pace back and forth along the table. “And nature is full of self-healing mechanisms, of course, so the solution we need is _in_ the water already. We just have to find it. Harry, what would it take to neutralise those chemicals you found with your tests? What would transfigure it back to normal seawater? Do you know what’s in seawater? It’s special salt, right?”

“Of course I know what’s in seawater,” Harry said, refusing to think too deeply on how Draco had slipped and used his first name. It was too nice to contemplate just yet. “It’s water of course—hydrogen and oxygen—with a lot of chloride, sodium, sulfate, magnesium, calcium, and potassium making up the salts.”

Draco blinked. “Wow, you actually knew that.”

Harry rolled his eyes. “I’m a field chemist, stupid. I spent most of the last five years actually swimming around in the stuff.”

“Right. So sometimes with potions ingredients, if you mix them in certain ways they’ll revert to their most basic forms. Is there a way we can mix the chemicals your tests found in the water with other ingredients to get them to revert to their basic, natural forms?”

“Some yeah, but arsenic’s already a base element. It’s not changing further.”

“Fuck,” Draco said. He began to pace again. “Okay, what about this—”

_“Harry?”_ called Lee from several floors up. 

“Down here!” Harry called up. 

“Is Malfoy down there? His cousin’s here! Man’s got a beard!”

“What the fuck?” said Draco, who’d stiffened like a statue.

“Oh, yeah, I told Kyle where we were staying,” Harry said with a shrug. “We’re coming!”

“How could you?” asked Draco.

“We need his help. Plus, I like him. He’s very American.”

“Which is precisely why you _shouldn’t_ like him.”

Harry rolled his eyes, walked past Draco to the stairs. “Well I do. And I like you, too, sometimes, so if you want to get some tonight, you’ll be nice to your family. Coming? Hermione texted that she and Padma were going to pick up Indian.”

“I’m not sure that I do,” Draco said primly.

“You do,” Harry assured him. “You were very clear about that last night, and again, today, remember? You danced around admitting you enjoyed my company, which means, in you-people speak, that you enjoy it very much.”

“I shall tell you what I’m not enjoying very much,” said Draco as he stalked past Harry and up the stairs towards the attic. “You, America, my cousin, my substitute’s weekly reports of my students’ behaviour, America, this sodding water crisis, listening to Mermish on a daily basis, and Americans.”

“I notice I’m only in that list once, and not even at the end,” Harry said as he jumped the stairs two at a time. “Arguably, the end is supposed to be the biggest point.”

They crawled out of Harry’s trunk and into his bedroom at the Airbnb, which hadn’t been slept in even once yet. Downstairs, the house was alive with laughter and hard, American Rs. Harry had to give Draco a little push in the small of his back to keep him moving towards the kitchen. He didn’t know what it meant that these little gestures and easy teasing came so naturally so quickly. It hadn’t even been forty-eight hours and it already felt smooth and warm like a well-loved, timeless connection. He wondered when the shoe would drop and if he’d be able to handle it when it did.

“Dude!” 

“Hello, Kyle,” Draco said in a voice just one degree warmer than permafrost. “Fancy seeing you here, just three hours after I last saw you.”

Out of Draco’s line of vision, Lee was turning red trying not to laugh. And just beyond him, Narcissa looked on with barely disguised amusement while Blaise didn’t bother pulling himself away from today’s Juventus game on the kitchen telly. Malfoy’s crew was certainly making themselves at home in Harry’s Airbnb.

“Yeah, I was telling Quincy about your problem after she got home from work, and she suggested we take a few weeks off and come down to help. Plus, it’s been ages since I saw Aunt Sis, and Quincy’s never met her before at all. We’re using it as an excuse for a little alone time, if you know what I mean.”

Harry practically felt Draco cringing. 

“Hello,” said Quincy, after thoroughly rolling her eyes at her husband. “Quincy Addams Malfoy. Lovely to meet you.”

She was tall, very thin, and very pale, with black eyes and very straight black hair, cut in a chic lob against her sharp shoulders. In sharp contrast to Kyle, she was wearing all black—soft-looking suede flats and a sleeveless black knee-length dress with a wide-belted waist.

“Hi, Harry Potter,” he said, when he realised Draco was still recovering. “A few weeks? That’s a nice agreement you’ve got with your employers.”

“Oh, Kyle can work from anywhere,” she said. “And I breed Hellhounds, so I have plenty of free time when it isn’t pupping season. The real trouble was convincing Libby to stay with Grandmama for so long. There’s only so many days of shoddy reception for _Daniel Tiger_ that any four-year-old will accept, you know.”

“ _Daniel Tiger_ ’s amazing,” said Kyle. “But a couple weeks without having to listen to that little shit Caillou was worth the sullen tears,” he confided to them, as if any of that made any sense to anyone. 

“My nephew watches that programme,” said Blaise, grimacing at the telly.

The front door opened, saving Harry from having to chat children on Draco’s behalf. Padma walked in carrying three big bags of delicious-smelling food, and everyone was suddenly not interested in Libertas Addams Malfoy’s favourite telly programmes.

Hermione came in after and shut the door, a mango lassi in one hand and the Rover keys dangling from the other. Harry couldn’t remember Hermione ever driving a Muggle vehicle before, or indeed, even learning to drive one. Or indeed, ever drinking a lassi. And was it Harry’s imagination or had she actually taken _Mrs Black’s_ advice and put on cosmetics? There was definitely something going on there.

“You got the onion naan, right?” asked Lee, who was already sticking his head in all the bags, looking for tin foil-wrapped bread. Padma slapped his hand. 

“Out! Yes, we got it.” She set the bags on the kitchen island and held her hand out to Mrs Malfoy the younger. “Hello, I’m Padma Patil.”

“Quincy Malfoy, and my husband, Kyle.”

Padma’s smile grew delightfully, evilly wide. “Oh? Draco’s cousin? How lovely to meet you both!” 

Hermione followed suit, giving Draco the most un-Gryffindor smirk (if he was the type of man to still use House-related identifiers at the age of thirty) he’d ever seen on her. Draco, for his part, was doing his best to talk to his mother about something dull and money-related so he could ignore his cousin, but she was wise to his machinations and only sat listening to him talk with amusement.

“Oh, dude, I could’ve told you that you want to convert your currency at Primer Banco Mágico in San Diego. Something about the time zones. The goblins there always give a better rate. Not worth the hassle for a few Euro, but if you’re bringing over a bunch, it’s worth it. Plus the airport vendors always shift you.”

“Thank you, Kyle,” Draco said stiffly. “I’ll remember that for next time.”

They finally got seated around the table, which had to be magically expanded, with plates in front of them. Fortunately, Hermione had had eyes bigger than her mouth when ordering, something that tended to happen with her and any ethnic food that heavily featured cardamom and nutmeg, which basically meant Hermione ate a lot of curry and Christmas cake when given free rein. The result was plenty of food for everyone, even with two unexpected guests.

“Did you guys find out anything?” Harry asked her, between bites.

She nodded, sipped her lassi, and swallowed. “Yes. Ms Jones was able to get us Portkeys to all the main Mer liaison sites, so we managed to visit them all today in good time. It’s quite interesting, really. The more established Mer tribes have designated spots to meet them and these little bells you can ring to indicate you’d like a meeting—under Anti-NoMaj wards, of course—”

Harry mentally rolled his eyes. Draco physically did.

“And then you just get a book and wait while a page swims up to see what you want. They’re delightful, really. Adolescent Mers actually look like the Little Mermaid. They have human—er, land human—colored skin when they’re young, and it greens with age, depending on the makeup of their environment, much like flamingos, only it helps for camouflage in this case—”

Draco cleared his throat. 

“Well, anyway. We stopped at the Gulf Water Nation rendezvous point first, which is just outside New Orleans, and met with Chieftess Fontanne and her daughter, Genevieve, who’s in her official apprenticeship years for training to be Chieftess. Genevieve was still young, and I thought she looked rather like Padma, really. You could see her blueing a bit around the gills, but they’ve still got a lot of pollution from that oil spill a few years back, and you can tell she’s going to go more of a jet colour than green, like her mother.”

At this point, Draco seemed to reconcile himself to learning the entire history of each Nation of Mers, and focused on eating his curry. Harry could only think about how bad that water must be if the oil in it was turning the young Mers a different colour. 

“Well, we learned from Chieftess Fontanne and Genevieve that their biggest concern is the oil spill, and the worry of another one. There’ve been three in the past decade, including one just last month when a barge had a collision and spilt over 400,000 gallons... and a really big one when Hurricane Katrina came through. And with the British Petroleum company drilling there now, they’re worried about another big one. The water’s all dead along the coast and it’s full of sludge. Padma got you some samples, Harry.”

“Thanks.”

“Then we went to see the United Seas of the Pacific Nation next,” said Padma. “And they had totally different concerns. There are oilrigs along the Pacific coast, too, but the Mers are less concerned about that and more concerned about the storm drains from the major Southern California cities that empty into the ocean at intervals along the coast. As it is, there isn’t any point along the coast where they can safely live any longer, and Mers are coastal, not wide-ocean, beings. They need to be near land to live. So Chieftess Kailani wanted us to divert the storm drains and find a way to clean the water they put out, plus she also mentioned an island of plastic and rubbish.”

“What’s in the storm drains?” asked Harry.

Padma pulled out a whole case of labeled vials and set them on the table between the onion naan and Hermione’s dwindling lassi. “No idea, but I’m sure any number of household chemicals, human waste, and runoff.”

Draco wrinkled his nose and carefully levitated the case to the coffee table in the living room behind them. “On the dinner table, Padma?”

“Sorry, _Mum_ ,” she said. “Anyway, after that we popped over to see the Salt Lake Sirens, who have the most jarring German accents. We did learn that they came over from the Baltic Sea with German immigrants, so that probably explains it. Hermione and I were gasping to know how they crossed all that land; it turns out they paid the immigrants in treasure from sunken ships to take them in their wagons during the winter when they could melt the snow to keep themselves moist. Must be dead useful to be able to breathe above _and_ below water.”

Harry could agree with that. He suspected Draco did, too, although he was very good at not making that obvious.

“And then… well…” Hermione trailed off.

Padma, pursed her lips and finished for her. “Chieftess Kaybree, and Chieftess Mother Brynlee, along with all twelve of Chieftess Kaybree’s husbands—”

“Consorts Ridge, Beckett, Hunter, Zayden, Dakoda, Ledger, Jerrick, Tylen, Jaxon, Londyn, Bentlee, and Wessen—” Hermione inserted.

They all stared at her.

“What?” she said. “I used a mnemonic.” 

“Anyway,” said Padma. “They’re just a few years out of a long, bloody revolution. Apparently, the German immigrants they travelled with convinced the Mermen that the Mermaids were going to lead them into temptation, and thus Hell, and that they had to stage a coup and become the rightful leaders of their people—”

“But we all know how well men do at running things,” said Narcissa. 

There was a beat of silence as she carefully sliced a piece of Chicken Tikka Masala with a fork and knife and everyone else stared at her. Narcissa did not look up.

“Right,” Padma said, after a moment. “That’s certainly true with the Mers. They’re all matriarchal, but the Salt Lake Mers have only just returned to that after a couple hundred years of male rule, which was marked by war, violence, and bad decisions, and things are only now beginning to turn around for them, so they’re actually quite content, or, at least, they feel as though things are starting to go right for them. Chieftess Kaybree is their first chieftess since leaving the Baltic Sea. She overthrew her father, Chief Diesel, and fed him to the lake whale some years back. I do think there may be an above-average level of mercury in the water there, though. Everyone was a little… off.”

“The lake whale?” Lee asked with interest. 

“Yes, some years back, an entrepreneurial Muggle released two whales into the lake. Fortunately, they were magical whales. Otherwise they would’ve died. The water’s many times more saline than normal ocean water. And yes, Harry, there’s several samples in there for you,” Hermione said.

“I bet it really stings if you get a cut in that lake,” Lee said thoughtfully. “Imagine all the salt.” 

They shuddered.

Padma continued: “We also had the Great Lake Ladies to visit. They were our last stop. They’re interesting because they’re freshwater Mers, and I’ve no idea how they got there, and neither do they. I suspect they’re descendants of the First Mers, who are more scattered among the smaller lakes and parts of the Great Lakes.”

“We met with Chieftess Delora and her sister, Vice-Chieftess Aegea. They were the oldest Mers we’ve met. Delora must’ve been in her three hundreds and Aegea not far behind,” said Hermione. “Anyway, they’ve got a huge problem with algal blooms up there. Entire lakes are basically dead for large parts of the year. Plus, the water’s full of microbeads—it’s these tiny little plastic exfoliating beads that come in Muggle face and body wash. They don’t degrade, and then they get in the lake and the fish eat them and the Mers swallow them, and so on. The beads have actually been showing up in the flesh of fish caught and sold for consumption.”

“Disgusting,” Blaise said. Harry had to agree. 

“So the Ladies want something to suck out all the microbeads and kill off the algae, and, in general, clean the water up. It’s quite nasty.”

Silence fell for a few moments as everyone took in the aggregate news from the Mer tribes. Harry’s curry was going cold and he reminded himself to take a few bites. Nothing like hearing how people could fuck up main element needed for life to turn off one’s appetite.

“Well,” said Blaise, after a moment. “After all that, I’m sure you’ll be unsurprised to learn that we had virtually no success with the Muggle politicians. They were completely uninterested in environmental issues.”

“I believe the words they used were ‘Climate change is a hoax,’” Narcissa said. “I’m not sure what that means.”

Kyle sighed. “That sounds like ‘em. They fight against their own interests all the time just because they’re afraid of losing campaign sponsorship from these big polluters.”

“They also said it would be too expensive to stop polluting,” Lee added. “And that they had fish farms. I guess that was supposed to be an offset. Not sure how.”

“It’s always a money thing,” Kyle said. “I’m realising that more and more now that I’ve moved over to working policy with them almost daily. But it’s also a culture thing. Americans, even Magicals, are used to instant gratification. We like everything _now_ , and that makes it hard for us to see the long game, like some Asian cultures do. Our politicians would douse their wives in mustard gas because it smells nice, without even bothering to worry about to what comes next because it’s only what happens _now_ that matters.”

“Then we need to _make_ it a problem now,” said Draco. “That shouldn’t be too hard.”

Kyle lifted an eyebrow. “How’re you gonna do that, cuz? It’s not like pollution is hidden. They see it. They just don’t care.”

“They’d care if it affected their assets,” Draco said, smirking. “Your wealthiest Muggles—what are their main investments?”

Kyle shrugged. “I dunno.”

“Real estate,” Quincy spoke up. “They all invest in real estate. Hotels and the like.”

“Just as I suspected,” said Draco. “Now, how do we threaten the people with the money? We threaten their real estate ventures. Who’s going to book a room in a hotel with a beach so deep in rubbish you can’t see the sand?”

“We’re not going to pollute the water _more_ just to prove a point, Draco,” Padma said, sighing.

“Who said anything about more? I’m talking about that rubbish island the Mer Queen talked about. Let’s haul it in.”

“And dump it all on the beaches?” Harry asked.

“I thought we might save a portion for the shoreline. It would be child’s play to fashion up a ward that pulls all the rubbish in and holds it in the shallows.”

“Oh, like reverse osmosis,” Harry said. “Yeah, I reckon we could do that. But what about the Mers in the meantime? They need a coastline.”

“We can leave a portion free.”

“No good, man,” said Lee. “The NoMug—NoMajes would just holiday there instead, and then the Mers wouldn’t be able to hide so well.”

“Fucking hell,” sighed Draco. “We’ll have to send them on holiday, too, then. Padma, do you think they’d consent to a few months around a desert island?”

“Maybe,” she said. “We can pop over again tomorrow and find out.”

“Good. And might as well do the other Nations, too. That way we can bring all the rubbish in at once for every coastline in the country. For now, we should go with this plan. Mother—can you look into creating a permanent ward that would pull rubbish in from the oceans and lakes and hold it along the shoreline?”

“Of course, darling.”

“Mother won the Young Spellcrafter’s Award in her seventh year,” Draco added. Harry bit back a smile at the pride in Draco’s voice. 

“That may take care of the physical rubbish,” Hermione said, “over a few months to a few years, anyway. But we still have the algal blooms and the chemical toxins. Oh, and the oil spills, which I suspect are a different problem.”

“The algae will be from nutrient overloads,” Harry said. “Organic compounds, you know? From fertilizer and stuff. We can starve the algae off by filtering out the phosphorous and nitrogen, or starving them of light. They like the sun a lot. But it’ll come back with the next good rain when all the fertilizers and shit flow back in.”

“Another ward?” asked Blaise. “To keep the shit in the soil?”

“I dunno,” Harry said, frowning. “It might kill their crops if it sits there.”

“Who cares?” asked Blaise.

“If they’re desperate, they’ll just get worse,” Padma added, reasonably. 

“They’re obviously using too much to begin with,” Draco said. “If it stays in the soil, they won’t need to re-up so often.”

Harry hesitated. He caught Hermione’s eye and she shrugged. “I suppose we could try it. We’d want an anti-erosion ward, a phosphorous and nitrogen magnet sort of thing, and a potion to evaporate the phosphorous and nitrogen that’s already in the water. It’ll need to be slow-acting, though. A lot of it evaporating at once could be dangerous.”

“It says here on the Google,” Lee spoke up, “that what they’re supposed to do is create these buffer zones for the run-off. Riparian zones.” He was leaning almost all the way into the screen, his eyes squinting. Hermione reached over and fixed the zoom on the laptop. Lee beamed. 

“Well we can’t do everything for them,” Blaise said. He still had half an eye on the Juve game. “They’ll get lazy.”

“They’re already lazy,” Draco muttered.

“We’re _all_ lazy,” Harry corrected. “Wizards banish rubbish to the sea, too. We’ve just got _Aguamenti_ when we need fresh water.”

“We’re lazy with a plan then,” Draco said, rolling his eyes. “We’ll start with the rubbish osmosis ward, but I’m still hopeful for something that can clean up the water quality quicker than I can teach Mers how to brew a potion I haven’t even invented yet. Any ideas?”

No one had any.

“Something will come to us,” said Narcissa. “In the meantime, shall I and Misses Patil and Granger begin on the Arithmancy for the ward? Mr Zabini, I believe you took it, too; are you confident in your skills?”

He shrugged. “About as confident as any gentleman of leisure would be twelve years after he took the NEWT.”

She nodded. “That will do. I have some ideas for this. Mr Potter—do you have any reference material on the reverse osmosis you spoke of?”

“I can get some printed for you,” he said. “It’s all on Google.”

She looked faintly displeased. “Yes, thank you. We’ll get started straightaway, and while we do, Draco, you, Mr Potter, and Mr Jordan can work on a suitable water cleaning potion.”

“I’m really rather rubbish at potions,” Lee said, apologetically.

“So am I,” said Harry. “Chemistry’s way easier, though, and similar enough that we can be helpful.”

It felt good to have a direction again. He thought of the text he’d gotten from Ron last night and smiled.

>   
>  _Murdoch’s a real arse. Told the Prophet today that he’s grateful you rose to the occasion to do your part, but wishes you’d done it a lot sooner._
> 
> _I bet he does_   
> 

—Was all Harry had said in reply. But now they had a plan that would solve like thirty per cent of the problem, and Murdoch could suck his dick as well as Draco’s. They’d be back in England by the New Year.

-x-

That night, they all went out to eat. Mrs Malfoy wasn’t accustomed to the early thirties life anymore and even Harry could tell she was fed up with Chinese food. She chose a restaurant called Le Diplomate and despite it being three times posher than anything Harry had ever eaten at, she was somehow able to get them a table.

The Mr Redfellow who joined them at their table just as they were sitting down may have had something to do with it. Mr Redfellow worked in magical politics, though he was cagey about which side. Regardless, he was very attentive towards Mrs Malfoy, and Mrs Malfoy was very aware of it, if her little smiles were anything to go by.

“She’s got a subplot,” Draco, arms crossed, said to Harry as they watched Narcissa laughing at something Mr Redfellow was saying. “I don’t know what she’s up to, but I knew she’d written herself a little plot as soon as our Portkey landed.”

“What’s wrong with a subplot? Everyone gets bored if it’s just some dumb hero trying to save the world.”

“Tell me about it,” Draco said, sighing. “I had to listen to that story for seven years at Hogwarts.”

Harry manfully didn’t give him the pleasure of a response. “Have you heard anything from Murdoch?” he asked instead. “Ron sent me a text… seems like something’s weird over there.”

“Murdoch’s afraid of something,” Draco said. “I haven’t figured out what, yet.”

On Harry’s other side, Hermione leaned in, a wide, fake smile on her face, and whispered, “Is Malfoy’s mum fucking a politician for political favour?”

“Granger, _please_ ,” Draco begged.

“She is, isn’t she?” Hermione insisted. “What’s she trying to get?”

“My mother is the only person who can keep her secrets from me, Granger. I have no idea.”

“I can keep secrets from you,” said Harry.

Draco gave him a particular look. “No you can’t.”

“I can,” Harry insisted. “Watch me.”

“What secret are you going to keep from me?” asked Draco. 

“Ah ah.”

“For all I know, you don’t even have a secret. You’re just going to pretend you have one for ten years and then tell me it was all a laugh over a pint one day.”

Harry’s chest swelled. “I suppose you’ll find out in ten years, then.”

Draco rolled his eyes. “There’s no secret.”

_That’s what you think_ , Harry thought, smirking.

Then the food arrived, and Harry was left to enjoy the warmth of wined-infused conversation, of getting to know people he’d never bothered with, like Padma and Blaise. Of getting to know new people like Kyle and Quincy, who were so very like Malfoy in some of their posh ways, but so very different from him in others. And Mrs Malfoy, who was without doubt running some kind of game, and doing it quite well. He had no idea what her subplot was. He had a feeling it had nothing to do with the Mers.

But that was okay. They all needed a night without the Mers.


	9. Chapter 9: Rewarding Wards

It didn’t take more than a couple of weeks before Narcissa was able to give them news about the rubbish osmosis ward for the shoreline. An ambitious project, but they were an ambitious group. It was heading into autumn now, and the leaves were beginning to colour and fall in the city. The mornings and nights were chilly, but the days still remained warm. 

On the Saturday of Lee’s fourth date with Madison—Harry knew which because Lee wouldn’t stop texting her these days—he and Draco spent an entire afternoon in the Grimmauld Place lab, testing and trying different experimental potions, to see if any of them could clean up large amounts of water. They weren’t having much luck with that, but Harry was having a fair bit of luck with Draco.

Usually in the bedroom, but sometimes again in the lab. And what was better—he’d started waking up to find Draco still there in the mornings. He didn’t know what Draco was telling Blaise or his mum, and frankly, he didn’t care. It still felt like a dream that would break apart and disintegrate like Ron and Hermione’s marriage if he studied it too closely, so he tried not to. He tried to keep his heart back and enjoy it, let things progress as Draco allowed them. 

And Draco allowed a good bit of sex, and a fair number of sightseeing “dates” but he didn’t kiss Harry often… or indeed at all outside of sex, and… well, that was something Harry wasn’t thinking about. 

“I don’t think we’re getting anywhere else tonight.” Draco sighed, raising his head from an obscure potions book and rolling his neck. “I’ve got nothing. It’s still too big an area to clean. Even their Mer neighbourhood is too big. Shall we head up and join the rest of them outside?”

Harry glanced up and saw that Draco’s hair was sticking to his face, just as it had in his lab at Hogwarts when Harry used to visit him. He swallowed, feeling a sudden rush of longing. What were they doing? Could it last? What if Harry was just setting himself up for more heartache?

Harry finally nodded, “Yeah, sounds great.” 

But he still stood staring at Draco, his mind flowing away from him like sludge into a river. His thoughts were everywhere—the past, the present… cautiously in the future. It was starting to hit him now.

What if Draco was just fucking him?

What if it had all been just a fuck and there was nothing else to it? Nothing to the little flirty smirks, the way Draco’s hand sometimes brushed against Harry, the way he kept coming back for more? What if Draco had just been gagging for it after being stuffed up in that castle for so long, and Harry was the first easy release he’d found?

Draco quirked an eyebrow. “Are you okay, Potter? You look battier than usual.”

“I was thinking I might stay here,” Harry said in a rush. Somehow, all of his confused thoughts had focused into this one thing. Maybe England was bad for them both. 

“In the States. Permanently, I mean. Even if Murdoch lets me back. I don’t really miss England.”

Draco stared at him. “Oh.”

“It’s kind of nice here, isn’t it?” Harry continued quickly. “And I did bring my house with me.” He gestured lamely around him.

“Where would you put it?” Draco asked.

“I dunno. I kind of like this area. Maybe I could just put it next door. The wizard-space spells aren’t that difficult. I’d just need to get a permit from MACUSA, probably pay some import taxes. A few general forgetfulness spells and the Muggles would even think it had been here the whole time.”

“Right,” Draco said. He turned to leave.

“Wait!” said Harry. “Where are you going?”

Draco paused, but didn’t turn back around. “Like I said, everyone’s on the back deck enjoying the evening.” 

Harry shoved back so hard from his stool that it fell over. He raced to the door and grabbed Draco’s elbow, tugging him back. “I don’t want to end things with you,” he said. “I want us to keep going. I thought maybe you were getting fed up with England, too.”

“I have to go back, Potter,” he said. “Without our family ancestor magic, the Malfoy line’s meaningless.”

“Kyle seems to be doing fine,” Harry said. 

“They’ve got their own plots in New York,” said Draco. 

“Then bring yours here. Put them together. Wouldn’t that just make it stronger?”

“Potter…” Draco sighed. “There’s already an American branch of Malfoys.”

“No, there’s a New York branch,” Harry said. “Not a Mid-Atlantic branch, or a Seattle branch, or fuck it, even a Dallas, Texas branch.”

Draco wrinkled his nose. “Texas?”

Harry saw a crack in the armour and dug his fingers in. “Draco, I don’t want to lose you, but I think being forced to come here is the best thing that’s happened to me in years. It reminded me of the good parts of the magical world but it’s not stifling me in it. And I’ve seen my best friend more this month than I’ve seen her all year. It’s the first time in years that I haven’t been bored to death and vaguely resentful of the magical world, and part of that is because of you. The biggest part. If I go back to England, I’m going to be going back to watching Top Gear alone, on my couch, eating yesterday’s take-away. If we go back, it’ll definitely end us and you know it. The British wizarding world’s not going to stand for the two of us together, but here… here we can be anyone. We’re nobodies here. Hasn’t that felt like a relief to you?”

“I don’t know, Potter…” He sighed, shook his head. “I have a career at home. Not this strange… sabbatical. And maybe you should learn to embrace what you were born to, Potter. Everyone else has had to do it. You’ve got annoyances in your life, but so does everyone else, and they don’t just abandon their friends and family over them.”

Mrs Black slid into the painting of the Washington Monument that Harry’d purchased on one of their recent dates from a street artist and cleared her throat.

“Your presence is requested in the back garden for refreshments,” said she.

There was a silence as Harry and Draco continued to stare at one another. Harry didn’t know what to say.

“Just a minute,” he finally said. “We’re just finishing this up.” 

Mrs Black nodded and left the painting. 

Narcissa was mixing up a few drinks and she smiled when she saw them—or Draco, really. Kyle and Quincy were down again, and already chatting with Blaise. They were both excellent at not letting on that there was new tension between them.

“Limoncello Leviosa, Mr Potter?” she asked. “It’s my speciality.”

“Don’t trust her,” Blaise drawled. He looked suspiciously as though he were trying to keep himself in his chair, but Harry thought he was just weird.

“Sure, thanks.”

Narcissa smiled and handled him a tumbler. She started to hand one to Draco, too, but he gave her a look and she sighed and poured him a glass of scotch instead. They pulled their chairs up and Hermione flicked her wand to get the firepit going again. It cast soft, licking glows over their faces and gave off a little warmth to counteract the late summer evening chill. 

Harry took a sip of his drink and sighed. It tasted like bubbly lemonade.

“I have an update for you on the coastline ward,” Narcissa said after a moment of relaxed silence.

Harry cracked open one eye. He was starting to feel a little floaty.

“I tested the ward this morning on a small scale and it worked. I believe it’s ready for full-scale release, but there’s a complication. The ward draws on the earth’s latent magic, so we’ll have to cast it at every ley crossing along the coastline.”

“Every one?” asked Lee. “How many are there?”

Narcissa looked faintly displeased. “Twelve-hundred and ten.”

Draco’s head fell back against his chair. “That will take forever.”

“The ward is quite simple to cast,” said Narcissa. “I built it with the least blessed maintenance worker in mind, if necessary. There are nine of us now. It comes out to about one-hundred-and-thirty-four casts per person. The contiguous United States has 12,800 miles of general coastline and the ley crossings are about every twenty-five miles, although some cross at other junctures. We can request a ley-aligned portkey from MACUSA split up. In that way, we can bring it up in eight or nine hours.”

“That’s a long day, but it’s doable,” Padma said. “We’ll need to take a few breaks and carb-load to speed up magical regeneration or we’ll be too depleted to Apparate home, though.”

“Mr Redfellow called this afternoon to tell me my application for a house-elf was approved,” Narcissa said. “Kaylen’s arriving tomorrow morning. I’ll have her make us a few batches of biscuits and finger sandwiches first thing.”

“You got a new house-elf?” Draco said, fully alert now. “Mother, we can’t export an elf back to England. There’s an embargo!”

Narcissa shrugged delicately. “Yes, but I do so tire of take-away, darling. It’s not good for the figure or the complexion to consume so many vegetable oils.”

“How much did you spend on the elf, Mother?” Draco asked, looking defeated.

“Oh, I don’t know, darling. The currency conversion is so confusing. But we must look at this as an investment. Kaylen is an asset, not a liability.”

Draco rolled his head to look at Harry and Harry’s heart skipped a beat. Maybe everything was okay. “She was top of her class in the Arithmancy NEWT. She knows exactly how much that fucking elf cost.”

With his second Limoncello Leviosa, he was definitely feeling a little floaty. He reached out to set his glass on the ground and couldn’t find it. When he looked down, he found he was hovering several inches from his chair. Harry scrambled, grabbed for the arm rest, and pulled himself back down. He tried to give Mrs Malfoy a dirty look, but she was conveniently in deep discussion with Lee about an open position for commentator for the Washington Magical Nationals.

He decided to enjoy the fire and Draco’s warm expression instead.

-x-

Kaylen arrived at Malfoy’s Airbnb at 4:45 the next morning. Harry knew because Draco texted him about it:

> _Fucking house-elf is here. Not even daylight. If I have to be awake, so do you._

Harry disregarded that entirely and fell back asleep. When he awoke the second time, it was closer to half-six, and far more reasonable to be awake, even if they did have an early day. He yawned, rolled over, and groaned. How many Leviosas had he had? Mrs Malfoy was an evil woman.

Clutching his forehead, Harry staggered out of his Grimmauld Place bedroom, clunked down several flights of stairs, and started pawing around in his kitchen cabinets for a Hangover Potion. He better fucking have one. 

He did. After chugging it down, he felt much relieved, but that freed his brain up to think more clearly, and a new thought entered his mind: Draco hadn’t stayed over last night. Draco had been staying over in Grimmauld with Harry almost every night. And, sure, it hadn’t been every _single_ night, but it had been a _lot_ of nights, and it just felt wrong for him to be at his own Airbnb.

Hmm. He’d have to ask him about it when they met to set up the rubbish reverse osmosis ward.

Harry slipped into his jeans and tossed his green shirt on, slipped into his brown trainers and headed up and out his trunk. Downstairs, Hermione and Lee were making moves towards the door, but not as fast as they usually did. Even morning-person Lee was looking sluggish.

“Morning!” Harry said. He was feeling energized from the extra sleep, the prospect of seeing Draco, and the progress they were about to make with this stupid quest.

“Fuck off,” Lee said.

“Now, that’s a rude thing to say to someone who only has one hangover potion left and two friends.”

“Harry!” Lee said, desperately. “I love you, I need you, I can’t live without your friendship.”

“Hmm…” said Harry, tapping his chin thoughtfully. “You did tell me to fuck off just now.”

“Harry just give it to him. You _know_ I already took one,” Hermione called from the kitchen. He heard the sound of the Keurig finishing a cup and then she emerged with a thermos full of likely burnt coffee and a put-upon expression.

Lee’s expression morphed again. “Harry, give me the damn potion, you wanker.”

Harry handed it over and Lee swallowed it back, grimacing. “Thanks, mate.”

“Anything for someone who can’t live without my friendship,” said Harry.

“I’m glad you’re ready,” said Hermione. “I thought I was going to have to come rouse you, but I’d been putting it off because I was afraid Malfoy might be down there without his trousers, and I just don’t think I should have to deal with something like that, Harry. I really don’t.”

“He’s at his place,” Harry said. Both Hermione and Lee raised their eyebrows. “What?”

“Nothing,” they said. 

Hermione strode to the back door, where the anti-Apparition wards dropped off on the back deck. “Shall we? Narcissa gave me the coordinates for the ward anchor leypoint. We’ll meet them and spread out from there.”

They Apparated out and landed on a windy, rocky beach several degrees cooler than DC. 

“Ahh, you’re here!” called Padma. She waved them over. “Welcome to Maine. That’s Canada. You’ve practically been to another country now.”

“Should we put a toe over just to say?” asked Lee.

Blaise was already toying with the idea of doing exactly that, if his close proximity to the line and contemplative expression were any indicator. Lee jogged over, tapped his toe on the other side and then grinned. No sirens blared. 

“No preventative measures at all beyond this lighthouse and a sign. I guess they’re only worried about invasions from Mexico,” Blaise surmised. He shrugged, hopped over, then hopped back.

“I really feel the need to visit Canada, too, now,” said Harry. 

Hermione sighed, waved him over to do it. He jogged over, grabbing Draco’s hand as he passed. Draco resisted, but that’s what those-people did, so it wasn’t concerning. And anyway, he did end up in Canada with Harry for a moment.

“It’s like we took a holiday to another country together just now,” Harry whispered to him. He was simultaneously trying not to feel hopeful and not get his hopes up. He’d come close to baring it all to Draco last night. Maybe he’d forgotten everything that was said after a few drinks.

“Hardly,” Draco scoffed.

There were four more pops and Narcissa arrived with the American Malfoys and a young house-elf dressed in a patina-green toga and leather sandals. 

“Morning!” Kyle called to them. He had a short, stylish robe over his t-shirt and trousers today—an American flag motif. Quincy’s was more restrained—black, over her black leggings and oversized black jumper.

Narcissa called them all over and explained the ward to them. It was exactly like reverse osmosis: the ward would create a semipermeable magical membrane about twenty yards out from the lowtide shoreline; what made it different from normal, Muggle osmosis was that instead of drawing ions and particles through the membrane to equalise the density of the water, it drew in large inorganic objects—plastics—by creating an false density in the outer ocean. In short the ward made the ocean think that it was already full of plastic rubbish and the rubbish floating on it needed to be moved to the other side of the ward membrane. 

Harry was assigned the coastline from the bottom third of Oregon to San Francisco. Draco had the Canadian border at Washington down to Harry’s first leypoint in Oregon, and Quincy would take San Francisco to the Mexican border at California. Padma and Hermione took the Gulf Coast, and Blaise, Lee, Kyle, and Narcissa took the eastern seaboard and the Great Lakes, with Narcissa starting them off in Maine. 

She demonstrated the wand movement and the chant to bring up the ward at that leypoint.

“Remember that you’re drawing magic from the earth, not your core,” said Mrs Malfoy. “Not only will you tire yourself out if you use your core magic, but you’ll waste your time. The ward requires the commitment of the area’s own magic. Without it, it’ll unravel. Now, let me see everyone perform the wand movement. I want to make sure you have it right.”

They all went through the spell a few times until Narcissa was satisfied, and then Kaylen the house-elf passed out croissants, currant scones, and pears. They sat on the line dividing the United States and Canada to eat. Kaylen came round with Portkeys for all of them. They were made of compasses and had an official MACUSA seal on the back.

“These will pop you from spot to spot in your range, sirs and ma’ams,” Kaylen said. “If you use the south end, you’ll start in the south spot. If you use the north end, you’ll start in the north.”

“Thanks, Kaylen,” said Harry.

“You’re welcome, sir.”

“Kaylen,” Hermione said hesitantly. 

Kaylen paused before her, Portkey held out. “Yes, ma’am?”

Hermione took it, licked her lips. “I notice you don’t speak like the house-elves where I’m from. Do you know why that is?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Kaylen. “Because it’s racist.”

Hermione blinked several times. Being Muggleborn _and_ mixed, she’d had her fair share of slurs thrown at her over the years, Harry knew. And with Lee, Blaise, and Padma there, it was not a comment that went unnoticed.

“Could you explain, Kaylen?” asked Padma.

Kaylen handed Padma a Portkey, too. “You must not be very familiar with the history of this country, ma’am,” said Kaylen. “It is not a conversation to have just now. It’s far too complicated. I will tell you that house-elves are not bound to families in this country, and our families send us to elf finishing school before we start working. We’re paid wages and we’re given performance reviews semi-annually. I think the rest will be apparent to you now,” she finished, almost gently.

Hermione sat back, mouth still parted. She ripped off a piece of her croissant and chewed on it almost absently. “Slavery,” she whispered, horrified. “I should’ve realised.”

“It is easy to forget when you don’t have to look at it,” Kaylen said, and then she moved on.

At 7:30, they couldn’t delay any longer. It was already going to be a long day. Harry watched Draco select the north end of his compass Portkey before he made his decision. Harry went south. When he popped into existence on the other side of the country, hidden in a MACUSA-maintained maintenance box, the first thing he noticed was the sun. 

It was only 4:30 here and the barest hints of civil twilight were coming through. It was quiet and peaceful everywhere. The leypoint was at the bottom of the south-end of the Golden Gate Bridge, in a national park. He didn’t have to worry about being seen. This part of the world was still sleeping, just a few early risers already on the road and getting started with their days. 

Harry lifted his wand and began the chant Narcissa had taught them. He felt the magic rise up from the earth to meet his call. It coalesced around him like a warm shawl until the last word of his chant, when it slammed back into the ground, leaving nothing behind to show it was there save a warmth to the ground. One down, one hundred and thirty-three to go. It had only taken him four minutes.

He was about to activate his Portkey when he saw it: movement on a rock beneath the bridge. He peered closer. A Mermaiden, still young, with tan skin and olive-green hair, was lazing on one of the rocks, her tail kicking aimlessly up and down like a teenager. She spotted him, tensed. Her tail curled and her webbed fingers gripped at the rock. 

They were crepuscular, Hermione had said. He could see why now. How much nicer it would be to enjoy the world like this every day, with no land-humans around. It was peaceful here. Hesitantly, he waved. She tensed further, then dove into the water.

Vaguely disappointed, Harry activated his Portkey and landed some twenty-five miles up-coast, in an area allowed to be even more beautiful with fewer inhabitants. Another eight minutes and he was done. On and on he popped up the California coast. Sometimes, he could feel the other knots of magic tied into the leypoints by MACUSA. Sometimes, it felt looser and freer. 

The sun began to rise over the mountains when he reached Timber Cove. He stopped to watch it for a few moments, even though he knew they were pressed for time. They had to meet back in Maine when they were finished, so Narcissa could test the ward and make sure every line was up and activated. He didn’t want to hold them up, and yet, it was so nice.

He hoped Draco had stopped to look, too. There was a lot more to this country than he’d ever thought. Murdoch had no idea what he’d done sending him there.

-x-

The sun was setting when Harry popped into his last leypoint. He was tired—magically and physically—but the sandwiches Kaylen packed him had helped, and more to the point, the journey had given him a lot of time to think and a beautiful setting to do it in.

He stepped out of the anti-NoMaj maintenance box and startled at the sight of another person. 

But it was just Draco, leaning back against a disused pylon. The last point was at an airport in North Bend. Draco unfolded and came towards him. 

“You’re late,” he said.

Harry swallowed. In his current state, he was no good at all at distancing himself from the clusterfuck of emotions he’d got himself in. He still saw the sunrise through the redwoods in his mind. He still remembered the baby Mermaidens who’d been frolicking with seals somewhere along the north coast. There was way more to this country than house-elves in Statue of Liberty uniforms and obnoxious nationalism.

There was more to him and Draco than just a few Grindr-esque fucks. 

He fucking loved Draco, and he _knew_ it, and he’d let himself ignore it this whole time. Why?

“It was really pretty,” Harry said instead. “I stopped to look. Did you see any Mers on your route?”

He wasn’t afraid of his emotions. He was afraid of Draco’s. That’s how those-people were: they hid everything, even from themselves sometimes.

But maybe he wasn’t giving Draco enough credit.

“One,” said Draco. “I saw a kelpie in the Puget Sound.”

“They really surf,” Harry said. “I watched them.”

Draco watched him for a long moment, saying nothing. Finally, he closed the difference between them. For a moment, Harry thought Draco would kiss him, but instead he held his hand out. “Share my Portkey?”

Harry exhaled in a rush. “Yeah. Yeah, let’s.”

He took Draco’s hand and their eyes met and held. It wasn’t said, but in that moment, Harry knew Draco loved him, too. And maybe, he’d loved him this whole time, these whole twelve years Harry’d been visiting him or these whole eight years Harry’d known he loved Draco, too, or these whole fourteen years since they hated one another so forcefully in sixth year.

And then Draco activated the compass, returning them to the original leypoint, where Narcissa and the others would no doubt already be waiting. Harry’s body twisted into nothingness while his love for Draco spun out to fill the entire universe.


	10. Chapter 10: [Invisible Title]

Narcissa’s hands were shaking. She was good at directing attention away from them, but Harry had known to look. He saw the tiny shivers she masked in straightening her hair, the larger tremble she hid by putting her hands on her hips when Draco said something opportunely controversial. 

“When did you get back?” asked Harry.

“Just about half an hour ago,” said Narcissa, and that meant that she’d been shaking for half an hour post excursion. The sky was dimming now, nightfall coming on sooner as the year approached its end.

Draco went up to his mother and took her hands, passed her his and Harry’s Portkeys so that she’d have something to grab onto. Kaylen was next to her in her Statue of Liberty toga, collecting the rest of the Portkeys and putting them in a basket looped around her elbow. 

“Shall we take a moment to eat something before we bring the whole thing up?” asked Padma.

“Wonderful idea, Ms Patil,” said Narcissa. “Kaylen, darling, please fetch us some cold meats and cheese from the townhouse.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Harry sat down on the grass next to Draco, closer than he would’ve dared before. But things were different now. They’d both watched the Sun rise over redwoods and seen magic in the seas. Not together, but somehow still an experience shared. That was enough.

After they’d eaten, it was time to bring up the coastal ward. Narcissa’s hands had stopped shaking by now, and she was freer with her gestures again. Lee put up a Notice-Me-Not around them for any lingering Muggle tourists, while Kyle filled out the appropriate MACUSA paperwork for erecting a national ward. Narcissa went over her notes several more times, with Padma and Hermione following along. Then finally, as the sun was beginning its descent, Narcissa said they were ready.

“Stand up, please,” she said. “We’ll need to form a circle around the first leypoint, over here.”

They gathered around the leypoint marker beneath their Notice-Me-Not, holding hands to drive the magic through them, and Narcissa led them through the chant to activate the coastal ward string. 

The first chant, brought light soaring straight up to the sky, so bright and vivid that Harry thought there was no way Muggles could not see it, though he knew they couldn’t see magic. The second chant, sent it rushing southward at the speed of light, and they kept chanting. A quarter hour must’ve passed, with Harry’s grip on Draco’s hand growing firmer and firmer, and Draco’s on his returning it. And then a streak of light rushed in from the west and wrapped itself around the leypoint like a knot. 

Harry faltered in his chant, but they finished strong and the magic stabilised and sunk into the earth. The ward was up, and soon, that heart-stopping spectacle would bring something ugly to every shore. 

Draco’s fingers slid from Harry’s. No one in the circle stepped back. Narcissa’s hands were shivering again. 

“I hope we did the right thing,” Hermione said quietly.

“It’ll depend on how the Muggles react to it,” Blaise said. “They can take it as a gift, to make cleanup easier, or they could… not.”

In his own head, Harry struggled with the same moral dilemma. He thought it was the right thing to do, but it still seemed a hard way of doing it. But it was done. The ward was up, and rubbish would start coming in with the tides within the week. Within three months, all the rubbish floating equidistant or closer from US land would have arrived.

He really hoped the Muggles chose to clean up.

-x-

They reported back to Chieftess Undine the next morning. She met them at the designated meeting spot outside Annapolis and listened as Padma and Hermione carefully translated their progress to Mermish. They were above water this time, and Harry couldn’t understand what was being said, but the Chieftess’s expression was thoughtful and cautious, not angry. He thought that was a good sign.

He also thought Ron would have something to say about Hermione speaking Mermish. It would probably be something like, ‘Sounds just like her normal voice to me.’ That made him grin, and it also made him quickly wipe the grin off his face when Hermione asked what he was smirking about.

They returned to DC feeling invigorated and energised. One part of the problem was on its way to being solved: getting the physical rubbish out of the water so the Mers and other creatures wouldn’t choke on it.

They could no longer put off the bigger problem: making the water safe to swim and live in. 

They ended up all down in Harry’s trunk, gathered around the worktable in his lab. 

Watching Blaise Zabini descend a ladder as poshly as he could was a memory Harry would cherish and chuckle at forever. And with both Draco and Kyle standing next to one another discussing the ramifications of their ward—apparently, some underpaid admin had come across the paperwork and complained about it—he was able to snap a picture of the two of them together to send to Ron.

Ron’s reply was immediate:

> _Are you ducking kidding me?! THATS Malfoy’s cousin??_

Harry smirked as he tapped out a response. Ron came back with a series of laughing and other emojis that would make the most jaded millennial Muggle proud.

“Potter, what are you smirking at?” Draco’s voice cut across the room.

Harry quickly pocketed his mobile. “Nothing.” 

He’d brought Seabiscuit down to do some comparisons with his own tank water, which was specifically formulated to be a perfect seahorse environment. Seabiscuit was giving him a suspicious look, as if Harry would forget him in his lab again. But Harry had a plan this time: he put a reminder on his mobile. 

Harry took a scoop of Seabiscuit’s tank water and added it to the row of vials he was testing further for pH levels, salinity, density, and so on, to see if he could figure out a way to reverse engineer that into free ocean water.

He cleared his throat. “So, I’ve been conducting a number of tests with the samples we’ve collected. Some have returned more conclusive results than others. I’ll tell you what the main takeaways are. 

“First, every sample I tested contained above-acceptable levels of pesticides, herbicides, chemical fertilisers, detergents. The Gulf also had a high count of oil parts per billion and about half the samples contained sewage—you don’t want to know what’s in those. 

“Second, every sample was off by a few tenths or more of a point on the pH scale from what it should be. All of the water is trending more acidic than in should be. And finally, the algae levels in the Great Lakes, Gulf, and Chesapeake Bay are off the charts.”

“So what does all that mean?” Lee asked, tucking a lock behind his ear. “What can we do?”

“Potter and I were thinking of creating a water-filtering potion that the Mers could brew themselves,” Draco said. “But we’ve hit a block. Some of these chemicals, I can’t dissipate with a potion, or, at least, I haven’t figured out how, yet.”

“Well, we need to do something in the meantime… at least get it started. That water is practically uninhabitable,” Hermione said.

“It’s a _lot_ of water,” said Lee. “I have no idea how we can clean that much. The only water filtering spell is Aguamenti, and it just does one small stream at a time.”

Harry heard a bubbly shuffling from the stainless steel worktable on the side of the room. He looked over and saw Seabiscuit staring dourly at him from his tank. He tapped his little tail on the glass in the direction of his fish flakes. Fuck, Harry’d forgotten to feed him this morning. He should’ve put a mobile alert on for _that_. Hands down, worst parent ever.

Harry pushed back from the wooden worktable, tapped some flakes into Seabiscuit’s tank. Sometimes, he reckoned Seabiscuit would’ve been better off if he’d left him in the sea, tangled in all that kelp and practically buried under—

“I’ve got it!” Harry said. In his excitement, he tapped in an extra shot of fish flakes, which Seabiscuit didn’t complain about. “Invisible oysters.”

Draco laid his head in his hands. “Potter…”

“No, I’m serious,” said Harry. “Oysters filter water.”

“Then why aren’t they doing it now?”

“Because they’re overfished,” Harry said. “And I’d bet that a good number of them have died off from various diseases, too. We just need to repopulate them.”

“And make them invisible because…”

“Because we don’t want them to get fished, obviously. We need them to reproduce so much they practically raise the sea level, although not really because that would be bad for coastal cities. But you get the idea. They’ll need to coat the ocean floor for miles out.”

“How are we going to get that many oysters?” asked Blaise. “How do oysters even… you know?”

“It’s actually a very interesting process,” Hermione began. Harry lightly stepped on her foot beneath the table. She sighed, but changed direction. “They lay eggs,” she said instead.

“That makes it easy, then,” said Quincy. “I bet I could spell a sliver of demiguise hair into each of the eggs to turn them invisible. When they reproduced, about half would come out invisible, too. Maybe more, depending on how they bred. Then they’d take care of the rest themselves. I’m sure we don’t have to concern ourselves overmuch with inbreeding since oysters are born and die in the same place. There can’t be too much genetic variation there.”

“And they’re just oysters, so who cares?” asked Blaise.

Harry snorted. 

“So we need a few thousand oysters to start off,” Draco surmised. 

“Crawfish for the Gulf,” Harry added. “They filter, too. All shellfish do. And seaweed, too.”

“Fuck it, let’s get a whole menagerie,” said Draco. 

“Draco, that’s hardly necessary,” said Narcissa. “Just the useful ones.”

Harry liked Narcissa. He suspected she was the one who’d made the few sensible decisions in the Malfoy household while Lucius was still alive. She’d probably suggested they attend the Quidditch World Cup, for example, while Lucius had been the one to suggest they invite Voldemort to Airbnb with them for a year.

Hermione said: “I’ve got a contact back at the Department of Magical Creatures that could probably get us a large order of live oysters, crawfish, prawns, lobsters, and fire crabs. I don’t know about the seaweed, though.”

“I can get that,” said Draco. “It’s a common potion ingredient in the Mediterranean. I have a supplier there.”

“I don’t know if I can breed invisible seaweed,” Quincy cautioned. “I do fauna, not flora.”

“The seaweed could probably stay visible,” Harry said. “It’s less of a delicacy… over here, at least.”

“Alright then. I’d be happy to do the breeding for you,” said Quincy. “Hermione, have your friend ship the animals to the Addams Mansion in Sundown, Lower Catskills, New York. My auntie will let me use her dungeon to do the breeding. It’s much better setup for any dangerous results than we have at home.”

“Of course,” said Hermione.

Privately, Harry wondered just how dangerous breeding a few invisible oysters could be, but chose not to comment.

His phone buzzed again. He pulled it from his pocket. There was a photo from Ron, a shot from an evening edition _Daily Prophet._ He tapped the picture and zoomed in to read the headline: _Minister proposes legislation to limit Wizengamot seats to term limits._

Well, that was weird. Half of the Wizengamot seats were hereditary, just like the Muggle Parliament. He didn’t think the purebloods would go for that. Harry really was clueless on recent magical politics; he had no idea how a Minister could propose such a thing and not commit political suicide.

“Potter,” said Draco, and Harry immediately looked up, pocketing his mobile again.

“What?”

“How long would it take the oysters to start cleaning the water?”

“Well, one oyster can filter about two gallons of water an hour. How many gallons of water did you say were in the Bay, Hermione?”

“Eighteen trillion.”

“Fuck, that’s a lot. Well, um, math…” He searched around and found a spare notebook and biro. “Okay, so it would take one oyster 750,000,000 days to clean the Chesapeake Bay, which I’m guessing is too long. So to clean it up in, say, a month, we’d need… 25,000,000 oysters.”

“Are you shitting me, Potter,” Draco said flatly. “How are we going to get twenty-five _million_ invisible oysters?”

“Also keep in mind that that’s an adult oyster who can filter two gallons of water an hour. I’ve no idea how much a baby oyster can do, so we might want to err on the higher side. And Draco, a single oyster can release a hundred million eggs a year. I don’t think we’ll have a problem spawning enough. Hauling them to the water and getting them situated in it will be the harder problem.”

“Get me a thousand healthy ones and I can get you one million freshly hatched invisible oysters in a month,” Quincy said. “They’ll have to do the rest themselves, especially if I’ll need to start again with crawfish and lobsters. And we’ll want to go with native oysters for both the Bay and the Pacific coast—there are different types on each side.”

“I can do that,” Hermione said, taking notes. 

“That gets us closer,” Harry said. “If we can put a million in the Bay, and if we could entice them to breed themselves, it would only take about two years to filter the entire Bay. That’s not terrible, considering how long it took humans to fuck it up.”

“It’s a start,” Draco agreed, “But we don’t have two years to finish this. Let’s go with Quincy’s plan, but not rest on our laurels just yet.”

It wasn’t that Harry wanted to spend two years on this project—he didn’t, and he didn’t want the Mers to have to wait that long, either—but he almost—as Kyle would put it—kinda, sorta wished Draco wanted to stay. 

Because he was starting to almost, kinda, sorta want to stay.

-x-

It took a couple of weeks for the first successful batch of invisible oysters to sprout up on the backs of their mothers’ shells. At first, Quincy had thought the breeding failed altogether, until she stuck her hand in the tank and felt around on the oysters. There were indeed small, invisible, barnacle-like creatures clinging to them.

By then, the coastal reverse osmosis rubbish ward had started proving itself, too. Beaches all over the country were filling up with trash. It was all over the Muggle and magical news. A natural phenomenon, Muggles said. A dark lord, the magicals suggested, though MACUSA was quick to tamp that down, though they would not comment on the real cause.

For the most part, their group was ignoring it and hoping it would die down as soon as the Muggles started cleaning it up and putting forward proactive legislation. If they ever started. They were still complaining about property values and states’ rights (and states’ obligations—the flyover states especially had no interest in their tax dollars going to beach beautification projects in Tampa Bay).

Draco received the first batch of oysters by Floo on the morning of Lee’s fifth date with Madison the waitress. Which had inspired Harry to manoeuvre Draco into another date, perhaps sightseeing.

“We should drop them in the Potomac with a multiplying tracking spell and see how well they do in polluted water,” Harry suggested. Which is how their date turned into paddleboarding on the Potomac. He still couldn’t interest Draco in the Freer Sackler Gallery.

As they arrived in Georgetown, and thus the paddleboard rental kiosks, Draco quickly changed their course.

“No fucking way am I putting a toe in that water,” he said. “It’s disgusting.”

Harry quite agreed. They decided to get brunch instead.

And it was at brunch that they finally caved and brought up their predicament again. It was like going for drinks with coworkers—one just couldn’t help talking about common grounds of shit.

“I got a letter from Murdoch,” Draco said, his lip snarled. “He wants a progress report. I told him to ask Kennedy Jones for it because I was busy.”

“He’s getting weird,” Harry said. “The more I think about it, the more baffled I am that he could’ve felt threatened by me enough to threaten to fire my friends and their families just to prove a point. I mean, I hadn’t even been in the paper in months.”

Draco rolled his eyes. “What an accomplishment.”

“And to be fair,” Harry continued, “What threat were you? Hogwarts parents actually _liked_ you as a professor. There was no scandal around you, no one vying for your position. I just don’t get it. Any of it.”

“I think Mother knows something,” Draco admitted. “I can’t figure out what, but I have noticed she’s been keeping a close eye on the _Daily Prophet_ —she’s getting it delivered to our terrace every single morning. The Floo transfer fees for a single paper are twice the monthly rate!”

“I dunno,” Harry said. “But it’s weird.”

-x-

Harry ended up getting a sample of the Potomac and bringing it back to his lab, but his concentration was fleeting. The longer he was here, the more of an arse Murdoch and the rest of the magical Ministry were, the less Harry even wanted to go home. What was there to return to? He, Ron, and Hermione had been on monthly catch-up dinner dates for years. He’d seen more of Hermione in the past month than he had in all of last year combined. He could always get a Portkey to London for the holidays.

And he kind of liked this place. It was lively and strange. People liked him as soon as he opened his mouth with a non-rhotic R. Mrs Black also seemed keen to stay near the portrait of Hugo Black, though for the life of him, Harry could not understand why.

No. That was a lie. Harry knew the uncomfortable and unbecoming ways a heart worked. He knew how one wanted—needed—to be near the person one loved, even when there wasn’t a scrap of a chance. He’d let himself get ripped off because of that for years, after all. 

And… sometimes, crazy, Merlin-level miracles happened. 

For a moment, Harry couldn’t breathe. He stopped, his fingers hovering over the knobs of his microscope, hands shaking. It was only now that he grasped the enormousness of what was happening to him. He was here, in another country. He’d never left the UK before, not even to go to Ireland. He’d never been _anywhere_. Here he was in another place, halfway across the world—

—And Draco had given him his attention. 

And then they got the call. 

Or rather, Lee got the call. He was the only one of them who’d been out and about enough to distribute his mobile number to anyone of significance. And that evening, the person of significance was the Editor of the _Washington Owl Post_.

“ _What_?!” Lee said from the kitchen, loud enough to startle Hermione, Padma, and Harry out of their _Gilmore Girls_ marathon.

They all turned to look at him. He’d gone white, and his mouth had fallen open as he listened to the person on the other end. Suddenly he pushed back from the dining table, knocking his chair over in the process, and grabbed the notebook stuck to the fridge by a magnet. He ripped it off, grabbed a pencil, and started furiously taking notes.

By now, Hermione had turned off the telly. They went to the kitchen and huddled around Lee, all three feeling an overwhelming sense of impending doom without knowing why. 

“No comment at this time,” Lee kept saying, over and over. 

When he finally rang off, he just stood there for a moment, staring at the black screen of his phone, his brows creased.

Lee set the phone down on the table by his laptop. He looked up at them. “We’ve got a problem.”

“No shit, Lee, what is it?” asked Harry.

“Someone leaked our coastal ward to the paper,” he said.

They relaxed slightly. “We got MACUSA approval for that,” said Padma.

“And they leaked the Mers involvement in that cruise ship overturning this summer.”

“Oh, fuck,” Hermione whispered.


	11. Chapter 11: Harry’s Questionable Decision-Making

It wasn’t thirty seconds between when Harry sent the text and when the angry crack of Draco’s Apparition echoed in the back garden. Five more pops followed right after: Narcissa, Blaise, Kyle, Quincy, and Kaylen the house-elf.

“Tell me everything,” Draco said, as he pushed open the back door and strode in. He was in a t-shirt and sleep pants—the closest to undressed Harry had ever seen him in front of other people.

“They’re going to press tomorrow morning,” Lee said. “The Mers, the cruise ship, why we’re in the country, the rubbish ward… everything.”

Everyone was quiet. Hermione and Padma seemed to be staring at one another so intently Harry would’ve thought they were communicating with Legilimency. Hermione looked away first, her eyes casting down, sad. He hadn’t seen her look that sad since they’d first arrived, when she’d still been reeling from the divorce.

“Who leaked it?” Draco demanded.

Lee shrugged. “You know the press don’t reveal their sources.”

“Motherfucker,” Draco whispered, and it was poignant in the silence that followed it, unfilled by a rebuke from his mother.

“What are we going to do?” asked Padma.

No one had an answer at first. 

But as they’d done since they arrived in August, it wasn’t long before they buried their feelings on this shitshow and got to work. 

“The Muggles hate the rubbish ward,” Blaise said. “Magicals, too. When it comes out we did it on purpose, we’re going to be blacklisted.”

Draco nodded. “MACUSA won’t be any use to us with that, even though we’ve got the approvals. They’ll ‘no comment’ until the end of time. We’re going to have to weather it alone. What else do we have?”

“The Mers and the cruise ship technically aren’t our fault,” Harry said, “but we’re going to get slammed regardless, just because we knew about it.”

“And the _Washington Owl Post_ definitely knows we know?” Draco asked.

Lee nodded. “They know.”

“Everyone is angry about the ward,” said Hermione. “They’re going to take it out on the Mers more than us. We’ll be persona non grata, no doubt, but it’s the Mers who’ll feel the real brunt of their anger. Not for killing Muggles—Magicals can find an excuse for things like that,” she added bitterly, “—But for making their own lives more difficult by being indirectly responsible for the rubbish ward.”

Kyle shifted from one foot to the other. “I’ll go in at first light and start working on everyone I can. I’ve built a few favours up since I moved to the Non-Magical Political Liaison Department.”

“Good, thanks,” said Draco. “Tamp it down as much as you can. In the meantime, we’ve got to show that we can solve this once and for all. If we can’t, we’ll likely get sent back to Britain and they’ll reverse everything we’ve done. As much as I’d like to go home, we can’t go under those circumstances. Potter, Mother, and I have been effectively blackmailed and if we turn up without a solution in hand, things will go even more to shit.”

Hermione gave Harry a curious look at the word ‘blackmailed’, but he refused to meet her eye, focusing instead on his coffee, which had a strange plastic aftertaste. She’d come too close to the truth with her joke the other week.

“So we have to both stop the riots and counter the fear. We can’t simply give the Mers what they want and be done with it. To do so will only prove to our cowardly government that we’re too powerful to be allowed home. We have to make the Mers happy while also evidencing that Potter and I are powerless to do much of anything useful.”

Harry flopped back against his chair. “Well, good thing I brought my entire house with me. We’re never going home in that case.”

Malfoy gave him a narrow look. “Potter, shut up. It’s entirely possible. Most people think you’re useless already.” 

“They think _you’re_ useless,” Harry muttered. “They liked me just fine.”

Draco ignored him.

“Look, I’m not going to let them destroy our work,” Harry said forcefully. He stood up and began to pace. Seabiscuit watched him amid a palette of pink gravel. And that was the story Harry felt in himself. 

“The sea isn’t ours,” he said. “It doesn’t belong to land-humans. It belongs to the Mers, and the fish, and the oysters, and the seahorses, squids, sharks, and lobsters that live there. We have no right to fuck it up, and I won’t let anyone—Muggle or Magical—reverse the work we’ve done to clean up their environment. The Mers’ environment is still shit, with all the rubbish floating in their favourite spots, but the deep waters are cleaning up, even way at the bottom. And our oysters will help, too. 

“All the Muggles have to do is drag a net through, collect the shit they threw in the water to begin with, and dispose of it properly. They’re _not_ taking down our ward.”

“We can’t stop them,” Padma said. “It was a MACUSA approved installation. They have the installation documentation and it wouldn’t take them long to bring it all down and let that rubbish float back out to sea.”

“Then we have to tie it off,” Harry said. “Make it permanent, so MACUSA can’t take it down even if they wanted to.”

“Harry…” Hermione said. “We can’t do that.”

“We can,” Harry insisted, mouth firm. “Narcissa can make it so that no one can take it down ever.”

They turned to her. She pursed her lips. “That’s true.”

“What’s the catch?” asked Lee.

“A blood sacrifice,” said Harry. “Isn’t that right?”

“What? Harry! You can’t do that! Why would that even work?”

“The pH value of blood,” he said. “It’s always exactly the same, in everyone everywhere. Seven point three-five to seven point four-five. Variance beyond that is fatal. That’s why blood magic is irreversible. It always stays the same.”

“Potter,” Draco said. Harry flicked his eyes to him. “They’ll burn you alive for that. It’s _dark_.”

Harry didn’t care anymore. He was tired of getting fucked around, and more: he was tired of seeing the Mers get fucked around. The more he studied their water, the angrier he was. “Let them,” he said.

He turned to Narcissa. “I want to do it. We need to go tonight, before the story breaks.”

“Harry, this is stupid as hell!” Lee said.

“Mother—!” Draco began.

Narcissa eyed all of them, saying nothing. Harry got the message. Harry held out his hand. 

“I’m ready,” he said.

Hermione was the first to catch on. “Harry, no!” she said, reaching out.

Narcissa nodded. “Kaylen, please.”

Harry took one of Narcissa’s hands and one of Kaylen’s. He looked back just once, and found Draco staring at him with the most curious mix of emotions he’d ever seen. He couldn’t quite read it.

And then they were gone before Hermione could make another move towards them.

-x-

They popped into Maine, the first leypoint shimmering just a bit in the dark. Strong magic could sometimes be seen, even when it was latent.

“Thank you, Kaylen. You may return to the townhouse until I call you. Mr Potter and I can handle it from here. Please dissuade my son and the others from following.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Kaylen popped away, leaving Harry standing on a shivering-cold beach with only Malfoy’s mum for company. They strode towards the leypoint in silence, no one speaking. The wind was harsh now, and bitterly cold. October nights were not comfortable this far north.

When they reached the leypoint marker, Narcissa stopped and turned to him, regarding him as if he were an Abraxan she was considering purchasing. 

“Are you quite sure, Mr Potter?” she asked.

He nodded. “I don’t want to see our work thrown away, and that’s the first thing they’ll do. The Mers don’t deserve to have their problems ignored anymore.”

Narcissa nodded once. “Then let us begin. We’ll have to work quickly.”

She drew a silver pocketknife from her short robe pocket and flicked it open. “Hand, please.”

“You seem very well versed in blood spells,” Harry observed.

She gave him an arch look, saying nothing. He held his hand out, palm up. Their eyes met and held.

In truth, Harry was fairly well versed, too. His mother had used one for him, after all, and there had been a time, some years back, when he’d wanted to know all he could about that.

Blood was like water—an element of life. Its composition and properties fascinated Harry nearly as much as water did, though there was less market for a blood specialist outside of phlebotomists and vampires, neither of which Harry was interested in. 

The truth was, blood made him squeamish.

It was unsettling to be so fascinated by something that turned one’s stomach, and so he’d chosen, ultimately, to stay with water. He knew he’d made the right decision all those years ago. But it didn’t erase the months of hermitism he’d lived through, holed up in the Grimmauld Place library before the purge, reading about all the dark things that could be done with blood.

And then, of course, the not-so dark things. Things like this. He’d known it was possible to make this ward permanent. But most wizards would never take on the burden.

When he’d said blood sacrifice, he had not been hyperbolic. 

Narcissa’s knife came down on his palm and pulled towards her, the blade slicing open his skin. Harry’s breath left him all in a rush. He fell to his knees, winded. His eyes lost focus, his vision tunneling until all he could see was the beautiful sharp grey of Draco’s eyes. 

The sacrifice was different for every blood ritual, but the price was always an objectively proportional trade. To protect an entire nation’s coastline from losing its property, Harry would have to be unprotected and vulnerable for four times the length of time it had taken to establish the protection. He would be without control of his magic and without strength of his body for thirty-six hours.

He could make it through th—

-x-

The story broke the next morning. Harry read it around ten, well after Hermione and Lee had woken, pulled up the _Owl Post_ on Hermione’s iPad and scanned it multiple times. He was too exhausted to care sooner. He and Narcissa had been in Maine well past three in the morning, and blood magic took a great toll on the body, no matter how little the sacrifice.

Blood was tricky that way—it didn’t like to ‘let go’ of its creator body. It would keep holding on, magically, long after it’d been pulled from the veins. And that hold could drag a wizard down, make him feel like he was walking through a swamp for weeks, months, or even years afterwards the ‘sacrifice’ wore off.

“What was the sacrifice?” Hermione asked stiffly, staring at him over the rim of her mug. 

“It’s just thirty-six hours,” Harry said, tiredly. He was ready for about three cups of coffee himself. “And I slept off seven of them.”

“Does Ron know about this?” she asked, still in that annoyed voice.

“Not unless you told him,” Harry said.

She turned her nose up. Across the table, Lee was watching the both of them, his eyebrows raised, saying nothing. His mobile vibrated. Harry caught a glimpse of a woman’s face on the screen before he picked it up and quickly started texting.

Hermione was too angry to speak to him, but he did catch a glimpse of _her_ phone screen, too—rapid-fire texts with Padma. Several unexpected emojis.

Shortly after, Quincy Malfoy brought down the first full batch of ready-to-go oysters for the Chesapeake Bay. 

“One million,” she said, as she set the last, ocean-smelling crate on their Airbnb floor. “I couldn’t shrink them without killing some off. Figured you’d rather have a million living invisible oysters covering your living room versus twenty thousand shrunken ones.”

“Wow,” said Hermione, staring at the boxes. There were at least thirty of them—on the floor, on the couch, pushing the telly to the side on the TV stand. Two were even set to hovering in the corner because it had seemed precarious when they tried to stack them.

“This is amazing,” said Lee, peering through the crate slats. “I can’t see anything!”

“The demiguise hair worked better than I thought,” Quincy said, looking pleased. “I even managed to splice in a Forest Niffler gene—I think that’ll help them to search out pathogens in the water quicker—and a rabbit gene to encourage quicker reproduction. These adolescents may surprise us with their speed. We’ll see.”

“Fantastic,” said Harry, grinning. He was so beyond caring about the story breaking this morning. They were pushing forward and Murdoch and the United States of Arseholes, as Draco so loved to call it, could bugger off. “How about the crawfish?”

“I went with lobsters next,” Quincy said. “The crawfish were proving a bit difficult. I’m trying a few things, but I’ll have a batch of lobsters ready for release next Wednesday. And the lobsters _will_ still turn red when boiled, but I don’t think that’ll be a problem.”

“I shouldn’t think so,” Hermione agreed. “Unless some buzzwordy businessman really does try to boil the ocean.”

“And the Pacific oysters will be ready then, too,” Quincy continued. “They were just as easy as this Bay variety, but we’ll need three million to make any difference.”

“How do they need to be disbursed?” asked Hermione.

“You’ll want to be gentle. They’ve already started forming reefs and we want to maintain those. My suggestion would be to put a third of the boxes down on the seafloor surrounding the Mers’ village. Then put the other two thirds upwater, where most of the toxic dumping’s happening. That should give us the most benefit the quickest.”

Harry looked to Hermione and Lee. Hermione returned his look with a clear signal that he wasn’t yet forgiven. “Shall we get them in before reporters are tracking our every move?”

“I think so,” Hermione said primly. “Padma has the Rover. I’ll ring her.” 

She stepped into the kitchen to make the call, leaving Harry and Lee with Quincy. “Thanks,” Harry said to her. “Really, thank you.”

“That’s what family’s for,” she said, shrugging. “And we Addamses always put family first. Even when family does something stupid.”

“We aren’t really family,” Harry had to say, because he was definitely a little confused. Maybe it was an American thing.

“Aren’t we?” she asked, one eyebrow up. “Draco’s family. And you and he… well, it’s very plain to see.”

Harry turned bright red. “Right,” he said. Quincy smirked at him. It had an almost sinister look to it.

She stepped forward and took his hand, still smile-smirking at him. “I have to go drop off Libby at pre-school before Kyle heads into work. I’ll see you next week, with the lobsters and Pacific oysters. Good luck.”

“Thanks,” he said.

Hermione passed Quincy as she was heading out to Apparate, slipping her mobile back in her pocket. “Padma’s on the way,” she said. “Draco and Mrs Malfoy are on the Floo with the _Daily Prophet_. They’ve just got wind of the story.”

Harry grimaced. He hoped they knew what they were doing. But then again, it was two Malfoys. They always had a subplot.

“We’ll go ourselves, then,” said Harry. “We should get it done quickly. We don’t want anyone seeing where the drop points are.”

A car horn beeped outside. Hermione grabbed her handbag and a crate. “That’ll be Padma and Blaise. Wow, these are really heavy. We should probably avoid a weightless spell—if we can’t see them to uncast them, we may miss some and they’ll float to the surface.”

So they lugged out all thirty crates to the front garden, and started stacking them in as Padma and Blaise got out of the car. Blaise was in a Juventus jersey today, though it was still a well-tailored Juventus jersey.

Even with the back seats folded down in the Rover, they were only able to fit twenty in. They were able to fit another four in the front passenger seat. That left eight.

“We’ll have to Apparate the rest,” Blaise said. “Padma can drive these up, and we can take the rest. Meet at the Mer rendezvous spot, say?”

They agreed on that, and Padma set off. The eight remaining crates were too heavy to lug all the way back up the front steps, through the house, and into the back garden, so Lee threw up a Notice-Me-Not, and they decided to chance it from the front. The crates were so heavy, they had to sit on one and hold the other in their lap before Apparating, as holding two was impossible for Hermione, and unwieldy to the point of dangerous for the rest of them.

When Hermione realised she’d have to Side-Along Harry along with four boxes of oysters, the frown deepened to Mariana Trench levels. She held her free hand out stiffly and he grabbed on. 

“You owe me so much, Harry Potter,” she bit out, but before he could say, ‘Don’t I fucking know it,’ she twisted on the crate and pulled them up to Annapolis.

Hermione landed first, and Harry settled just in time to see her lurch to the side as her crate settled on the uneven surface of several shore rocks. He held tight to her hand, barely keeping her from falling all the way down and scraping her hands on the rocks.

“Thank you,” she said stiffly.

When they were all in, they sent a message down to the Mer village with the announcement bell Hermione and Padma had installed. It was the same technology as the other Mer villages had at their rendezvous points, but MACUSA had never bothered to install one here, as the Chesapeake Merrows, née Scottish Merrows, were relatively new immigrants to the area.

They sat to wait. In good traffic, it would still take Padma fifty minutes to arrive. 

Already, the shoreline was piling up with bottles, cans, plastic bags, trainers, plastic forks, food containers, bottle caps, netting, broken toys, straws, cigarettes, even old tampons. There were more than a few dead sea animals in the mess—many tangled up in netting just as Seabiscuit had been in his kelp forest. 

His magic wasn’t entirely gone, it was just… not controllable. He could still access his accidental magic if he needed it. He was getting bored, so he suspected he needed it.

He took the downtime to try cleaning up what he could. He thought he could rig up a spell to reduce objects to their base parts, based on the same research he and Draco had been doing for a water-cleaning potions. It was just a matter of convincing his brain, and thus his magical core, that it was an emergency.

After a few tries, he got something to work, and he tried that on what he could. It felt like being winded with every completed cast, but then, what else did he have to do? The aluminium cans were easy to break down into aluminum, manganese, chromium, and magnesium particles, which were fine to release into the water—the oysters would sort them out. 

“Potter, are you really doing what I think you’re doing?” Blaise drawled.

“Yes,” said Harry.

The plastics and the nylon netting were a bigger problem. He could reduce all of them down to their basic makeup—petroleum, but he couldn’t go any further. That would mean adding what was basically an oil spill to the Bay, and he wasn’t sure that was a good idea. 

“Harry!” said Hermione. “Are you really casting after a blood sacrifice that took control of your magic away from you?! That’s it! I’m texting Ron!”

Harry turned and gave her an annoyed look. She missed it because she was busy telling on him to an Auror. Her fingers flew across the screen of her mobile, no doubt being as verbose in text as she favoured in real life. Then, Harry’s mobile vibrated.

“Hermione!” he whined. That would be Ron.

“No, Harry. You’re going to get us all in trouble, and you most of all! I want at least one person on our side before this ship goes down.”

“You’re not taking me with you, Potter,” said Blaise.

“Actually, me neither,” Lee added. “I’m not really the renegade type, the War notwithstanding. So it’d be great if you kept the impetuous cliff-leaping to a minimum from here out.”

Harry’s pocket vibrated again. He ignored it. He and Hermione were too busy having a staring contest. He looked away first. It seemed to mollify her, for she sighed and came over to see what he was doing. Lee and Blaise left them to it, and the silence shifted from angry and tense to just exhausted. They both were.

“Maybe we should start a reef closer to this shore,” Hermione eventually said, watching him. “Since it’s a designated rendezvous point and the Mers have to swim through it.”

“Maybe so,” he said, biting his lip. 

Yeah, they probably should, and if they did, Harry would at least be able to start in on these plastics. They levitated a small reef of oysters from one crate and waded into the water. This was a relatively unvisited section of the Bay for Muggles, since it wasn’t particular scenic. That was what made it so perfect for the Mers. 

They put on some Bubblehead Charms (Hermione cast his), took their mobile out of their pockets, and ducked underneath the water, carefully directing the oysters to the seafloor. Hermione pointed to a nice rocky patch about thirty feet down and they sent them down, applying a light sticking charm to the bottom oysters. They could move if they wanted to, but it would give them good purchase until they decided to attach their suckers to the rocks beneath. 

They got to work almost immediately. Their little mouths opened, few by few—Harry could only tell by the swish of the water moving towards that spot. By the time Harry and Hermione swam back up, there was a steady stream of bubbles coming from their reef—a clear sign that they were hard at work filtering the water.

They swam back up, Hermione Scourgified them, and they dried off. Blaise was giving them disgusted looks. Clearly, he had no intention of ever getting in open water again.

“Are Malfoy and his mum okay with the _Prophet_?” Harry asked Blaise when he’d resumed his ‘emergency’ spellcasting on the rubbish. It still felt like being knocked down with every cast, but he hated sitting idle. Hermione came over to help, and they quietly, but steadily, sent the Muggle-made plastics back to the earth. Harry eventually sat down to keep casting.

“Without doubt,” Blaise said, though he looked a little miffed anyway. “It’s the _Owl Post_ I’m worried about. Did you read it?”

Harry grimaced. “Yeah. Wasn’t flattering.” 

It had been years since he’d been featured on a front page, and even more years since it had been a scathing feature. The _Owl Post_ ’s article began with a scandalised account of the coastal rubbish ward annoying so many magicals and NoMajes alike, then went into an exposé on the Star Americana 3’s untimely sinking, and finally, provided a biographical of all seven of them—all factual, but not exactly presented in a cheery way.

Harry’s defeat of Voldemort had been touted as if he and the Dark Lord had been ‘frenemies’, while Hermione’s work with magical creatures had been ‘a revolution waiting to happen’. They had nothing on Blaise, so they put him forward as a do-nothing, while both Malfoys were written as entitled peerage—probably true. Only Padma and Lee escaped without negative comment. Lee was a mediator and award winning public relations person—of course he knew how to stay out of spin. And Padma was, well, Padma. Who could say a bad word about her?

Just then, Lee’s mobile began to buzz. He pulled it out and frowned at the screen. “It’s Kennedy Jones,” he said to them, before sliding his thumb across to answer. 

Their call did not look pleasant. Lee barely got in a word. When he rang off, he looked worried. “I have to go back downtown. She wants me there immediately to help rein in the story.” He hesitated for a moment before adding, “The way she explained it… I don’t think it _can_ be reined in.” 

He shook his head. “I’ve got to go. Good luck.” He popped off, leaving the three of them to wait for Padma. 

Harry was feeling more and more frustrated. Why couldn’t people just keep their noses out of things they didn’t fully understand? He knew who’d leaked the story—that underpaid admin. Probably for a cash deal. Maybe just to be an arsehole. But he knew one thing for certain—they wouldn’t have done it if they’d seen what Harry saw in the Mers, or heard their stories.

Now everything was going to shit, and they were just trying to do what they’d been forced to do. 

A few moments later, Padma pulled up, the Rover’s chassis rocking as it manoeuvered over the rocky trail down to the water. Padma put it in park and stepped out, looking a bit green. 

“I had all four windows down the whole way and must’ve cast an air-cleaning charm a dozen times. And I still can’t get the smell of fish out of my nose. You owe me,” she added, just before turning towards a bush and ridding herself of her breakfast. Hermione rushed over to help her.

“Let’s unload for them,” Blaise said. 

Harry was beginning to fret a bit. First, Draco talking to the papers, and the Lee being the only one of them summoned back to DC to help. He had no idea how the American Magicals were reacting to the news, but he suspected it wouldn’t be good.

When Padma was back to herself, they set about unloading the rest of the oysters. Several Mer pages came up to bring down the oysters. Hermione offered to follow to cast sticking charms for them, but they waved her off. 

“We have our own magic for that,” said one of the Mermaidens in a high, watery voice. 

They sent them off with ten small reefs of oysters to place around their village as they saw fit, and then they Apparated north, to the biggest dumping sites, each carrying a single reef. It took several trips and several trips into the most disgusting water Harry had ever seen in his life to get those oysters situated. He was sure, by the end of it, that he’d contracted one or more venereal diseases. There were not enough Scourgifies in the world to make him feel clean again. Blaise refused to even get in the water, and frankly, Harry couldn’t blame him.

But eventually, they were done. The oysters were settled, and that was all they could do for now. They Apparated back to the Rover, casting several more cleaning spells over themselves and in their mouths and noses, and in the girls’ cases—their nether regions as well. Harry did not blame them. They still laid towels down on the seats before hopping back in the Rover.

It had a faint hint of fish. Padma turned green again, but Blaise saved them all with a spectacular bit of air-freshening charmwork. They were just getting on the road for DC when Harry’s mobile rang. He saw Lee’s face on the screen and answered it warily.

“Harry,” said Lee, and Harry could hear the worry in his voice. “They know about the blood magic. Get home _right now_. Malfoy’s going to meet you there. And _hurry_.”

Harry’s stomach dropped through the floor.


	12. Chapter 12: Prodigal Harry

Draco was already waiting for them in the living room of their Airbnb when they got in. Hermione had ended up Side-Alonging him while Padma and Blaise brought the car back. He looked furious, which was not unexpected. 

“Potter, they know about the blood ward,” he said right away.

“I know,” Harry said, pushing past him into the house. “Lee called me.”

“Did he also tell you Jones put your name on the No Fly list as soon as she heard about it?”

Harry winced. “No.”

“They’re going to arrest you, Potter,” Draco said lowly. “You’ve got to go home. Today.”

“What? No way! Plus, Murdoch’s never going to let me back in the country right now,” Harry said.

“Mother’s made the arrangements,” Draco continued, as if Harry hadn’t spoken. “Redfellow saves the day, apparently. You’re on a 3pm Portkey to London, where Weasley will arrest you at the Portkey Arrivals gate.”

“ _Ron_? Why am I going home just to get arrested?” Harry asked angrily. “Apparently, I could do that here.”

“You do _not_ want to be arrested by MACUSA when you’re on a Terrorist Watch List, Potter,” Draco snarled. “If you get arrested here, you’ll be in Guantanamo Bay without a trial and no one will ever see your sorry arse again—and that’s _after_ they forcefully remove the blood ward from your magical core. You’re lucky Britain doesn’t like making the US happy and ignores extradition laws. Now go pack your shit. And don’t forget your fucking seahorse.”

Harry glared at him, then spun on his heel and stomped upstairs. He’d hardly unpacked. There wasn’t much to pack away. The bed was still unslept-in. He tossed his laundry into the Grimmauld Place attic and collected Mrs Black’s portrait. 

Downstairs, Seabiscuit looked even less thrilled at getting packed away as he had the first time. Harry apologised with a few crumbles of bacon.

Blaise and Padma had arrived by now. In the living room, they, Draco, and Hermione were in deep conversation over Hermione’s iPad and a fast-filling notebook. They ignored him as he stomped by, too caught up in their strategies to spare him any attention. Which was just fucking fine. 

Draco caught his hand on one angry pass, and for a moment, Harry’s heart sped up with hope, but no. Draco was just handing him the Portkey.

“Ten minutes, Potter,” he said, and returned to his work with the others.

Harry stared glumly down at the Portkey. It was a miniature plastic White House. He sat down on his trunk and stared balefully at the back of Draco’s head. At thirty-seconds-to, he grabbed hold of his trunk with his spare hand and took a deep breath. Hurricane Omar was hanging out in the middle of the Atlantic right now. 

Fuck, this was going to suck.

The Portkey activated, Harry yelped as he spun away. He could already tell this was going to be a bumpy trip, and he had at least eight minutes to go.

-x-

Harry landed on the Arrivals dais and barely made it to the courtesy Ill-Effects Bag dispensary before he lost everything he’d eaten in the past twenty-four hours, maybe more. His body was just not up to that kind of trauma at present. Twenty-one to twenty-three hours to go—depending on when the ritual considered itself taking effect—before his magic resettled and most of the exhaustion faded.

“All right there, mate?” came a welcome voice.

“Ron,” Harry whined, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. “Never travel trans-Atlantic during hurricane season.”

“No worries there,” said Ron, his hand coming down to pat Harry’s back. “I’ve no interest in visiting the United States.”

“It’s a shithole,” Harry said bitterly, though already, he knew he was going to miss it. He leaned over the Ill-Effects Bag for a few moments longer, making sure he was done. Next time, he was booking a flight.

“Sooo,” Ron said. “Feeling a little tired, eh?”

Harry nodded, straightened. It was already dark outside the windows. He pointed to his mouth and glared until Ron cast a mouth cleaning charm on him. It scrubbed at his tongue and gums much harder than it strictly needed to. Ron and Hermione were (probably rightfully) arsed off at him, but he didn’t regret it for a second. He’d put way too much work into this shit project for some government afraid of being voted out of office to dismantle it at the first whine.

“Go on,” Harry said. He held out his wand.

Ron took it, and then began in on a very bored recitation of the Auror’s Caution: “Harry Potter, I’m placing you under arrest for the casting of a dark ritual of international consequence. You do not have to say anything but it may harm your defence if you do not mention, when questioned, something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence. Cool?”

“I understand,” Harry replied, the consummate detainee.

“Off we go, then,” said Ron. He turned, and they Disapparated.

-x-

The Ministry holding cells were even less hospitable than Harry had anticipated. Ron had taken his trunk and his wand before depositing him in Cell Four, which reminded Harry very much of another Four—Privet Drive—in its overwhelming warmth and comfort.

He lounged back against the painted stone wall to wait. The yellow-white paint was chipping in places. There were names scratched into it in some places. Not a legacy Harry was keen to join. Around midnight, UK time, he clocked that no one was going to do anything about him until morning. He pulled the thin blanket loose from its hospital tucks and got in. 

He slept fitfully all night, despite the overwhelming fatigue.

Still on American Time, he wasn’t sure when he woke, but he knew it wasn’t yet eight. The sounds filtering in from the Aurory were still too quiet. Harry lay on the cot, letting his mind and worry run wild. 

Stupidly, he was less worried about his own situation than he was about the others’. His strength and magic would be back today and as long as the Ministry didn’t find out what his real sacrifice was for the blood magic, they were unlikely to guess he’d willingly given up control of it for so long. 

What were the rest of them doing over in the US? Were they still going to complete the work? 

Harry desperately hoped so. And desperately wished he was there helping. This was work he’d come to value more than he’d expected to. The Mers’ plight was real and tragic, and it deserved acknowledgement. It deserved a solution.

Shortly after the sounds in the Aurory picked up, Ron came in with a cup of tea and a plate of jammy toast. 

“Morning,” he said, passing Harry the food. Harry hadn’t realised how hungry he was until he bit into the toast. “The Minister’s going to call for you in about ten minutes, so eat fast.”

That Harry could do.

“Am I getting booked anytime soon?” Harry asked between bites.

Ron studied his nails. “Funny thing. We’re real busy today. Might not be able to book you until tonight, maybe tomorrow.”

Harry narrowed his eyes. “Ron.”

Ron rolled his in return. “Harry, shut up and don’t say anything stupid. We’re working to get you out of this mess before you’re booked. No charges on your record will look a lot better if this becomes a big thing, get it?”

“I was charged before fifth year,” Harry reminded him.

“You were a minor. They were expunged. Now eat up and I’ll clean your teeth for you before you see the Minister, you pillock.”

Harry shut up and ate. Ron returned a few minutes later with another well-proportioned Auror, and together they spell-cuffed him and led him up the private DMLE stairs to the Minister’s suite. Harry was pushed into a chair outside the Minister’s office and told to wait quietly. With two burly Aurors over him, there was little else he could do. He was stupid reckless sometimes, but not stupid enough to get Ron in trouble. That was the whole reason he’d allowed himself to get blackmailed in the first place, wasn’t it?

Not long later, the Minister’s door opened. His secretary nodded them in. 

Minister Murdoch was trying to look busy. He had his head bent over a stack of papers, his brow furrowed as if in deep thought. Harry called bullshit on that. When Harry was seated, Ron and his partner standing close behind his back in case he made a run for it, and the office door shut, Murdoch looked up. As though he’d just noticed their entry.

“Mr Potter,” He said gravely.

“Minister,” Harry returned.

Murdoch nodded several times, his grey-blond comb over flopping forward a tiny bit. Didn’t he know there were spells for that? 

“This is bad business, Mr Potter,” Murdoch continued. “Very bad business. The worst.”

“Really?” Harry said, surprised. Because he could think of plenty worse. Did he even need to say ‘Voldemort’?

“The worst,” Murdoch agreed. He shook his head. “We’ve got to do something about, this is serious, it’s a serious thing. Trade deals, exports. The MUS is thinking this is very serious.”

“Excuse me, Minister,” Harry said, “but what part is the serious part?” 

“All of it,” said Minister Murdoch.

“The cruise ship,” Harry suggested.

“Terrible,” said Murdoch.

Slowly, Harry continued, “... The rubbish ward.” Murdoch grimaced. “We got MACUSA approval for that,” Harry felt compelled to say.

“This blood spell business,” said Murdoch, “is bad. You don’t even know how badly this will keep us from trading with MUS.”

“It was a precaution,” said Harry. He was so confused by this entire ordeal. Was he going to Azkaban for a couple months or wasn’t he?

“Mr Potter, I sent you to the MUS to fix a problem, not create a new one.”

“We were resolving it,” said Harry. “We were meeting the Mers’ demands so they’d stop attacks.”

“We don’t negotiate with terrorists,” said Murdoch, and Harry’s mouth fell open.

“Minister, with all due respect, their homes are being destroyed and their children are dying. Gruesomely.”

Murdoch frowned at him, and for the first time, he gave Harry more than passing attention: “These are a Beings who have come into the MUS expecting to have everything given to them and when they have found conditions not perfectly to their liking, they have wilfully engaged in acts of terror rather than have their appointed representatives follow the proper procedures.”

Harry narrowed his eyes. “They don’t have an appointed representative. Nor a seat in either the MACUSA House or Senate. They don’t even get a vote in Magical President.”

Murdoch opened his mouth to reply, but a knock came on his door and his secretary stuck her head in. “I’m sorry Minister, but this just came in. I think you’ll want to see it right away.”

She quickly walked to his desk, handed him a large parchment envelope and was out again in the blink of an eye. The Minister gave them an apologetic look and opened the envelope. Inside was a clipping of a special edition _Daily Prophet_. Harry couldn’t read it upside down, but he could see the large photos of himself, Draco, and the Minister. And he noticed when the Minister’s fake-tanned face went white as a sheet.

Ron prodded him in the back, just as Harry was opening his mouth to say something. He snapped it closed. Ron knew him way too well.

“Aurors,” Murdoch said, his voice cracking, “I’ve seen no wrongdoing in Mr Potter. Surely this has all been a misunderstanding. Please release him at once, with the Ministry’s apologies.”

Harry gaped. 

“As you say, Minister,” said Ron’s partner.

Ron tapped his wand on Harry’s shoulder and the spell-cuffs dissolved. 

Harry stood up so quick he went light-headed. He still couldn’t read what was in the _Prophet_ article, and Ron jerked him out of the room before he could crane his neck in more. They were out of the Minister’s suite and back in the DMLE before Harry’s brain fully caught up with it. This time, Ron led him to a conference room, and sat him down with a fresh cup of tea, courtesy of the tea cart.

“What the hell just happened?” Harry asked, eyes narrowed.

Ron’s partner shut the door behind them, and ignored his question. “I’m Gawain Yaxley, Mr Potter,” he said. 

Harry’s eyes narrowed further. “A Yaxley on the Auror force?”

“A side branch of the family, I assure you,” said Yaxley, waving his hand dismissively. 

Harry looked to Ron. Ron shrugged. “What? We’ve been partners for seven years. Don’t tell me you never noticed.”

“I haven’t spent a great deal of time in the magical world over the last seven years,” Harry reminded him.

“Well, lucky for you, Gawain and I have,” said Ron. He raised his eyebrows significantly. Ahh, there it was. This was the part where Ron would remind him how he should’ve kept fighting for the Wizarding World.

They sat down across from Harry with their own cups and a plate of biscuits between them. They each took a biscuit, their hands carefully maneuvering around without bumping, as if they did it every day, and they probably did, knowing Ron’s love of biscuits.

“Explain.”

“Well, Gawain’s family friends with the Malfoys,” said Ron. 

Harry leant back in his chair. Now he could see where the pieces could fall into place, but he was still waiting for Ron to rub it in. “I see.”

“And when Malfoy was… _asked_ to help sort out the Mer problem in the States, Mrs Malfoy contacted Gawain to inquire about legality thereof, and so on.”

“It isn’t legal, for the record,” said Gawain, who was perhaps just ten years Ron’s senior. “Blackmail, that is. Asking a man to serve his country is totally fine.”

“Mrs Malfoy would’ve already known that,” said Harry. “She’s rather sharp.” Oh, how well he knew that by now.

“Of course,” said Ron. “She really just wanted the Aurors to know that there was something underhanded going on.”

“There is?” Harry asked. “Besides me and Malfoy, I mean?”

“There’s always a deeper motivation,” said Ron. “ _Always_. No one sacrifices a pawn to a queen without a bishop coming up from behind.”

Neither Ron nor Yaxley chose to elaborate on what that deeper motivation was. Harry drank his tea, feeling dazed. 

“You can’t leave just yet,” Yaxley continued. “It’s not over.”

“What do you mean?” asked Harry. He was already starting to feel more energised, and he suspected he’d be able to get away with an _Expelliarmus_ or two even without convincing his magic it was an emergency.

“Just wait,” said Ron. “It’s really better if no one sees you. Your arrest wasn’t public knowledge—you’re welcome for not booking you, which _would have been_ —so we’ve got time yet. Malfoy’s coming in shortly on a—”

“Draco’s coming to London?” Harry asked quickly.

Ron gave him a suspicious look. “Yes, _Malfoy’s_ coming, Harry. His name is Malfoy, not that other thing you said.”

“Draco?” Harry said innocently.

“I need another biscuit,” Ron said, sighing. He put two in his mouth, chewed them while staring Harry down. Meanwhile, Gawain checked his mobile. “You’re fucking him aren’t you.” It wasn’t a question.

“Er, not at present,” said Harry. 

Yaxley cackled.

Ron threw his head back, sighing. “Harry! Really? _Really_?!”

“Just a bit,” said Harry, holding his thumb and index finger close together in illustration. “You’d hardly notice.”

“How could I hardly notice? I’ll never be able to stop thinking about it now!”

“Really?” Harry asked in interest. “You think about my sex life that much?”

“You barely had one before,” Ron said, “so I don’t know. But I imagine that now that it includes Malfoy, I will, yes. I really shouldn’t have to put up with this, Harry. I really shouldn’t.”

“You—” _sound like Hermione_ , he finished in his head. “You’re a good friend, Ron. Thanks for not booking me. How’ve you been, anyway?”

Ron frowned. Yaxley made a show of looking at his mobile again.

“I’m all right,” Ron said eventually. “I mean, I will be. We’re going to stay friends.”

“Have you talked to her?” Harry asked.

Ron shrugged. “A bit by text. She’s still my best friend, you know. Besides you, of course. When I don’t have to arrest you while Mum’s shepherd’s pie is going cold and lonely waiting for me.”

“Thanks,” Harry said, grinning. 

“It was pretty tough for a while,” Ron continued, picking at a corner of his napkin. “I mean, who expects their wife to go gay?”

“I doubt she ‘went’ gay,” Harry said, circling his own finger around the rim of his teacup. He looked up at Ron through his fringe. “It’s not something you really decide on.” And, oh, how he knew that first hand.

“I know, I know,” Ron said. He sighed again. 

Yaxley was doing an excellent job of not paying attention, though he no doubt already knew the entire story from Ron. Auror partners got close like that. They had to. How else could you trust someone with your life?

“It’s just,” Ron said, hesitated, then laughed sharply. “It’s just that both me _and_ Ginny have been left because our partners realised they were gay.” 

Harry cringed, but Ron went on: “It makes you wonder, you know? Is it a Weasley thing? Is it a ‘me’ thing? Makes you think your blood wasn’t good enough…the part that gives you your looks, you know? Are Weasleys unattractive? Are they bad in bed? And why’d she marry me in the first place, you know? I guess you do know. Or don’t—complete opposite for you. I suppose Ginny knows what it was like… but then, then you two didn’t really stay friends,” Ron finished, frowning.

“We aren’t _not_ friends,” Harry said, guiltily. They’d tried; they really had. In the end, staying friends had just been too hard. And not just on Ginny. On Harry, too. He missed wanting her, even if the want had been strange and uncomfortable. He missed the easiness they had. He missed being around her and not feeling guilty.

“At least Hermione figured it out before you got old,” Harry offered lamely.

Ron barked a laugh. “Yeah, suppose I still have a few good years in me yet.”

“You’ll find someone,” Harry said seriously. “Someone good for you.” He cleared his throat and added, cautiously, “Weasleys aren’t unattractive, Ron. They’re actually… kind of obnoxiously over attractive.”

Ron looked at him quickly, but seemed to realised Harry wasn’t hitting on him. He shuddered—probably thinking about Harry’s sex life with Malfoy again. Harry really hoped that would continue. Draco had been pretty pissed off.

“There’ve already been a number of interested eyes on his bum since the divorce was announced in the papers,” Yaxley spoke up, proving he’d been listening the whole time. Those people were all the same.

Ron scrunched his nose. “Sure, yeah, like Pansy Parkinson,” he said with overly dramatic distaste. “She works for Gringotts’ legal team in Brussels, but word is she’s transferring back to London.”

“Oh? You know where she works?” Harry asked, cackling.

“We had to speak to her on official business about a case with an attempted break-in,” Ron said defensively. “I didn’t force her to wear such tight robes.”

Harry blinked. What did that have to do with anything?

“Mhm,” said Yaxley, staring at his phone again. It vibrated then, and Yaxley tapped out a few words. He stood from the table, sent the dishes zooming off to the department kitchen to start washing themselves. “Time to go.”


	13. Chapter 13: God damn it, Harry

Draco’s Portkey brought him to Hogsmeade, where Harry, Yaxley, and Ron had arrived just moments before. Draco landed straight, on both feet, closed his eyes and seemed to sway for just a moment. Then he swallowed, took several deep breaths, and stepped out of the town Portkey and Apparition spot.

“We’re going to my office. Let’s go.”

They started up the road back to Hogwarts, and Harry was awash with a sudden, almost tangible nostalgia for his school days. It was autumn and just about the time the kids would be allowed on their first Hogsmeade visit of the year. 

As they rounded the road, the train station came into view and Harry was relieved to see a single carriage with two Thestrals waiting for them.

“McGonagall knows you’re coming?” Harry asked.

“Of course,” said Draco.

Was it Harry or was Draco still being a little snippy with him?

They piled into the carriage. Draco took the seat next to Yaxley, across from Ron. He was _definitely_ still angry. And the ride up to the school was not one of Harry’s more pleasant ones. Draco stared out of the carriage window while Ron and Yaxley talked quietly about their Gringotts case and Yaxley suggested Ron might be carrying it on longer than strictly necessary because Pansy Parkinson was the main liaison.

“Weasley, you better stay away from Pansy,” Draco said.

Ron went red. “Oh yeah? And if I don’t?”

Draco turned, slowly, and glared at him. “She needs a real man, Weasley. Not some reckless Gryffindor who’s going to date her and dump her, or worse yet—widow her in ten years.”

“I’m not reckless! That’s Harry!” Ron said.

Harry sighed. He didn’t know if Draco was doing it on purpose, but he’d pretty much just ensured Ron would ask Pansy on a date and then he’d ask her to marry him and then he’d ask her for three to four kids just to prove a point. Which was just great because if Draco never forgave Harry for the stupid blood spell, Harry would still have to see him regularly when Ron and Pansy came around. 

This was why he’d stopped visiting Draco in his office to begin with. Seeing someone you loved but couldn’t have was the worst kind of torture.

Finally, they arrived at the front steps of Hogwarts, where Headmistress McGonagall was waiting, arms crossed. There was a _Daily Prophet_ folded under her arm. Harry still couldn’t make out the headline.

“Draco, really?” she said, her burr drawing out in exasperation.

“Good to see you, Headmistress,” said Draco. “How’s Professor Yarrow doing with my NEWT students?”

McGonagall’s eyes narrowed. “Not as well as you would be, as I’m sure you know.”

Draco grinned. “Excellent. And there’s still time for me to get them up to speed.” He tried to slide past her into the Entrance Hall, but she snaked a hand out Seeker-fast, and stopped him. 

“Is there now?” said McGonagall. “Are you back to stay?”

Draco nodded his head towards the paper. “I should think so. Don’t you?”

McGonagall pursed her lips, staring at him. Then she sighed and dropped her hand. “Off you go, then. But, mind, I’ll expect you in my office this evening for the full details.”

“Of course, Minerva.”

Harry almost did a double-take. It was so weird to hear someone his own age call the Headmistress by her name. But before he could fully process the strangeness, McGonagall’s green eyes settled on the rest of them. “Mr Yaxley, Mr Weasley. I’m glad to see you’re both doing well. And Mr Potter…” Her eyes narrowed for a moment, and she shook her head. “I would dearly like to see you, just once, when you weren’t causing mischief.”

“Mischief?” Harry repeated. He was beginning to wonder about the Wizarding World’s use of words, but perhaps he’d just been out of Britain too long. “Er, good to see you, too, Headmistress.”

She rolled her eyes and stalked off, leaving the three of them to hurry after Draco. Draco did not lead them down into the dungeons, but to the first floor. He’d never liked having an office and classroom in the dungeons, and had petitioned McGonagall for a better set during his third year teaching. 

They paused at a door carved with a dragon taming a knight and Draco pressed his hand against it. It clicked open and they stepped inside.

The office was bright and airy, with a whole wall of windows looking out onto the Forbidden Forest. That nostalgic ache Harry felt in Hogsmeade only intensified now. This was the room in which Harry had fallen in love with Draco.

Had he ruined the possibility of a true romance with his recklessness?

“Conjure yourself a chair,” Draco said, waving vaguely at them. “Weasley, better do one for Potter. He’s probably still fucked from his stupid spell. I’ll be back in a moment. I need to check on my class.”

He opened the door beside his desk and stepped through. There was an immediate voicing of, ‘Oh no, Professor Malfoy’s back!’ followed by Draco’s, ‘Shut your mouth, Mr Nettles, or I’ll give you a Veritaserum so strong you’ll never be able to close it again.’ 

This was followed by raucous laughter that quickly died off as the door shut behind Draco. 

Yaxley conjured a very nice Louis XV Bergere in gold brocade for Harry and a matching Corbeille couch for him and Ron. Ron ignored the couch to nose around in Draco’s office, but Draco had to have known that would happen. Harry had already done it dozens of times. There wasn’t much of interest to find beyond the up-to-date Chocolate Frog card collection. Draco did have several of Harry’s card, but, last time Harry had snooped, he was still waiting on a Ron card.

It took Ron the work of but a moment before he discovered this fact for himself.

“Hey, Gawain,” he said.

“Mm?”

“Still got that Frog card of me you got last week?”

“Never leave home without it,” Yaxley confirmed.

“Give it over,” said Ron. 

Yaxley rolled his eyes, but did dig out a pristine Ron Weasley Frog card from his wallet. Ron tucked it into Draco’s collection, smirking, and finally took a seat on the Corbeille couch. They waited patiently for Draco to return, and Draco certainly tested their patience with his absence. He did not reappear for another half hour, when the corridors outside the office filled with children’s voices.

“Did you really leave us here while you taught your class?” Ron asked, eyes narrowed.

“My students were at a critical juncture, and that was a NEWT class,” said Draco. “Of course I did.”

He took a seat at his desk, sparing only a moment to inspect Yaxley’s work on the furniture. “Now,” said Draco. “As usual, Potter has stirred up a shitshow, this time globally. It was only a matter of time, I suppose.”

“It’s mostly sorted,” Ron said. “The Ministry dropped the charges this morning.”

“Of course they did,” said Draco, “but MACUSA hasn’t.” 

Draco finally turned to Harry. “You’re wanted for public endangerment, and since it’s national-scale, they’re calling it an act of terrorism.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake, it’s just a bit of rubbish,” Harry said. “It needed to be cleaned up anyway.”

Draco shrugged. “Well, let’s hope Granger, my mother, and the rest of them can sort that out for you. How long was the sacrifice?”

“Thirty-six hours,” said Harry. “It’s already worn off.”

Draco didn’t seem particularly appeased. 

“Murdoch’s been trying to discredit us for months and you fed right into his hand.”

Harry blinked. “What? Why? He already had us out of his hair. Why try to discredit us?”

“Because he’s trying to dismantle the Wizengamot,” said Ron. “If you’d bothered to stick around and help out, you would’ve guessed that ages ago.”

 _There_ it was.

But more importantly: “What?!” Harry said. “Why on earth does he want to dismantled the Wizengamot?”

“He doesn’t like how slow it is,” said Yaxley. “Doesn’t suit his big ideas.”

“But what does that have to do with me and Draco?”

“We both have hereditary seats, numbnuts,” said Draco. “Which you would’ve known if you ever bothered to show up for a session or, dare I say it, a vote.”

Everyone in the office turned to stare at him. “Are you fucking kidding me,” Ron stated. “Even _we_ have a seat. Even _Hermione_ had a seat when she was still Director for Magical Creatures.”

“I have two seats, actually,” Draco said. “Mother has the Black seat. Because you never claimed it. And I sit the Malfoy seat."

“This is the best part, though,” Ron continued, and somehow, he’d procured a travel-size tin of biscuits and was now eating one. “The best part is that while you, Malfoy, and Mrs Malfoy have been gone, you’ve missed three votes. One passed. The other two were close. Andromeda’s been sitting the Black seat, though, and that helps.”

“What passed?” asked Harry. 

“The removal of a term limit for Ministers,” said Draco flatly.

“I thought they were pretty much unlimited already. I mean, Fudge was around for awhile, wasn’t he?”

“I can’t believe I’m explaining this to you,” Ron said wondrously. “Ministers serve for terms of six years. They can serve up to four terms or twenty-six years, in the case of taking over mid-term if the previous Minister dies or leaves office.”

“Huh,” said Harry. “Wow. And someone would actually want to be a civil servant for _more_ than twenty-six years?”

“Murdoch would,” said Yaxley. “And perhaps he might. What’s more interesting is the two motions he tried to pass, but failed. The first was to remove a hereditary seat if a family could no longer provide someone from the main line of the family to fill it, and let the seat go to an elected official instead. That nearly passed. The second was to add term limits to Wizengamot members. That one would’ve passed, save for the hereditary seats. They came together on it.”

“You knew this the whole time?” Harry asked. It was directed towards Draco, but he wasn’t really sure who he was asking. All of them, really. “You knew and you still let him send you over there?”

“Of course I did,” said Draco. “I needed something from him before I could act.”

Harry cocked his head. “What?”

Finally, he got to see the newspaper.

> _Murdoch blackmails Boy-Who-Lived, Malfoy Heir, sells state secrets to MUS_

Harry gaped. “I thought you weren’t going to tell anyone.”

Draco scoffed. “Of course I was. I just needed more convincing evidence. There was a low-paid admin in MACUSA’s Department of the Interior who had received several gifts from Minister Murdoch,” said Draco. “She agreed to look for anything you or I did while in MUS that could be used against us. He had suspected we would resort to a fix that could be spun for public opinion. We rather handed him that one. While MACUSA was happy to sign off on a national ward installation if it got the Mers off its back, they weren’t happy having the magical public find out about it.”

“Merlin,” Harry whispered. 

“Yes,” Draco drawled. “There’s my subplot all explained. I don’t know whether to be furious at you for the shit you’ve done or be grateful for how much easier you made it for me to get myself home.”

“Be grate—” Harry cut off, gasping. Well, this certainly felt familiar. He could barely breathe, his magic felt like it was being scraped out of him. “Shit, I think they’re trying to dismantle the ward.”

“Fucking hell, Harry,” Ron said, but there was a distinct note of worry in his voice.

Harry lost his balance and tipped forward out of his chair, tumbling to the hardwood floor of Draco’s office. His nose hit the wood first and he heard it crunch but he could barely spare a moment’s thought to the flare of pain because his guts felt like they were being unravelled and dragged west. 

“Harry!” Draco yelled. Harry heard his chair scrape back, crash to the floor. There were footsteps and then he was flipped over, Draco was right there leaning over him, his eyes huge. “Harry, you sorry piece of shit, you better not let them take your magic!”

“The ward’s permanent,” Harry reminded him woozily.

“Only because it’ll substitute your magic for the earth’s if they try hard enough to pull it down!” Draco ranted. He shook Harry’s shoulders hard. Harry’s head banged against the floor and his vision darkened. 

“Malfoy, stop it!” Ron yelled. “Gawain, get Madam Pomfrey and the Headmistress! Call St Mungo’s!”

“Harry!” Draco said again. “Harry pull it back in.”

“Why would they try to dismantle it?” he heard Ron yelling, as if from very far away. “They have to know what it would do to him!”

“I don’t think it’s MACUSA,” Draco said. “Harry. _Harry_ , are you listening?”

“Always,” Harry slurred. He choked on the blood running down his throat and his nose was aching ferociously by now.

“Pull your magic back, Harry,” said Draco. “You read enough blood magic books to be just stupid enough, didn’t you? How do you protect the sacrifice?”

“Fight for it,” said Harry, blinking heavily. There was another agonising tug on his core and he hissed in pain. His heart felt like it was beating overtime but he felt so tired. He was so confused.

“Keep it together, mate,” Ron said, and suddenly he was leaning over Harry, too. Harry couldn’t remember seeing Ron’s eyes so scared since the war.

“Hey, Ron.”

“Hey, mate. Listen to Malfoy, okay? You’ve got to focus on your magical core. Can you do that?”

“Where is it?” asked Harry.

“Wherever it hurts, pillock,” Draco snapped.

“Oh, right here,” said Harry, patting awkwardly at his sternum. “And a bit down, too. Hard to breathe.”

“That’s where it’s getting pulled out,” Draco told him. “You need to focus on blockading that spot so your magic can’t get by.”

“How?” asked Harry.

“Mother of Merlin,” Draco swore. He gave Harry another little shake and growled, “Just fucking do it, Potter!”

“It’s like body Occlumency, Harry,” Ron said. “Remember Occlumency?”

“I was shit at it. Always felt bad for letting Professor Snape down.”

“I seriously doubt you were letting him down,” Ron muttered.

“Do it for Professor Snape,” Draco said. “Clear your mind. Focus on me, okay? Ignore Weasley.”

Harry’s eyes snapped to Draco. They were still so big and grey and sparkly like that time they’d been underwater and Draco was going to drown. No! Harry didn’t want that to happen at all. 

“Focus on me, Harry,” Draco said. “Clear your mind of everything else.” 

Harry nodded quickly. That he could do. Another tug came at his core and he could feel himself starting to unravel like a ball of yarn around a cat. 

“Think about the first time. Our first time,” Draco said. “Remember how your body was on top of mine? Remember how your skin pressed against my skin, and blocked out everything else?”

Harry nodded again. Then Draco moved, stretched himself out on top of Harry. His body was warm, even through all the clothes. His fingers found Harry’s and intertwined. “That’s what I’m doing now,” Draco continued. “My body’s on yours, and nothing can get through my body and get to you. Can you see that?”

Harry closed his eyes, felt warm and protected, even when another tug yanked at his core. “No!” Draco said. “I’m not letting your magic leave you, as long as you believe me, Harry. You’ve got to _believe_ me.”

Harry did. Draco wasn’t the type to outright lie. He liked subtler messages, and he wasn’t being very subtle at all here, so he was being honest, probably. Harry felt his insides squirm as if tightening themselves around his bones, holding on tight. “I believe you,” he rasped.

“Good, good,” Draco said. “Use me as your shield. Are you doing that?”

Harry nodded.

“Okay, now you have your shield up, and I’m holding it for you, so you can focus on pulling your magic back to you. Are you ready?”

“How?” asked Harry.

“It’s mind over magic,” Draco said. “You have to command your magic to come home. You people can do that right?”

Harry nodded. “Gryffindors are good commanders.”

“Do it then,” Draco said. “Quit faffing about!” He squeezed their fingers tighter together and Harry was so confused because wasn’t Draco mad at him and where was Hermione when you needed her and why was this happening and— “Focus, Potter! I know you want to dally around in your delusions, but now is _not_ the time! Tell your magic to come home right now! There is no way I’m dating a squib!”

Harry could not have disobeyed if his magic depended on it. He wasn’t in quite the state of mind right then to really realise that it _did_ , but it didn’t matter. 

_Come back here right now!_ Harry told his magic. It dawdled for a moment, not sure whether or not he was worthy of it anymore since it had come so far out, but Harry firmed his mouth and said again: _Get back here! You’re mine!_

And then he _pulled_ with all his strength, like reeling in a shark. It resisted but then it started rolling back in, and then it came quicker, and quicker and after a moment, the last piece of it slammed into him, sending Harry and Draco sliding across the floor with the magical force.

The door burst open and Madam Pomfrey rushed in with McGonagall and Yaxley right on her heels.

“What’s the situation?” she barked.

“Harry tied himself to a blood ward in MUS and someone just tried to dismantle it,” said Ron.

“Merlin have mercy,” Pomfrey said. She fell to her knees beside Harry and started checking his vitals. She took her time healing his nose. “Draco, did he manage to pull it in?”

“Just now,” Draco said. Harry’s eyes followed the sound of his voice. Draco was leaning against a leg of his personal brewing station, breathing heavily and looking a little worse for wear. “I suspect he was seventy to seventy-five per cent drained before he managed to stop the flow and reverse it.”

“I need a scotch,” McGonagall said, sitting quickly at Yaxley’s Corbeille. “Poppy, will he be alright?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “He needs St Mungo’s for a full check-up, but I don’t see anything immediately alarming.”

“They’re on the way,” Yaxley said. “Sending two Healers.”

“I think the blood spell snapped, at any rate,” Pomfrey continued. “I’m not seeing a current one attached to his core.”

“They went sprawling across the floor when the last of his magic came back,” said Ron. “It was pretty forceful.”

“You must’ve been very determined, Mr Potter,” Pomfrey said, meeting his eyes for the first time.

Harry was still struggling to slow his breathing down. He felt like he’d been trampled by an Erumpent. 

“Can someone feed my seahorse?” he said.

“Harry, god damn it,” said Ron. “If Seabiscuit is in your trunk right now—”

“He is,” Harry said. “It was the whole getting arrested thing. I’d been on a good streak.”

“I ought to set him loose,” Ron said. “He’d be better off tangled in a kelp forest. Fine, I’ll go take care of him. And then I’m taking him home, where he can be properly cared for.”

The St Mungo’s Healers arrived then, a stretcher between them. Madam Pomfrey explained the situation as they, too, checked Harry over for vital and magical signs. He was lifted onto the stretcher. Draco directed them to his office Floo, all the while giving Harry a desperate, exasperated look.

“I’ll come by shortly, Potter,” he said. “I’ve still got your mess to clean up.”

Harry nodded. The two Healers pulled him into the Floo, and then they were away.


	14. Chapter 14: The Flood

Much to Harry’s disappointment, the first person to visit him was Hermione, not Draco.

She looked even more tired than she had the day they Portkeyed into the MUS, with purple smudges beneath her eyes and a grey tinge to her skin. She looked dehydrated, hungry, and worn out.

“Harry!” she said, managing to muster up a fair bit of enthusiasm despite her state. “Oh, I’m so glad you’re okay. I’ve been worried sick—”

“I’m fine,” he said. “How are the Mers?”

She paused, shook her head, and then came to take the visitor seat by his bed. He swore he heard something creaking when she sat down. 

“Good,” he said. “But the Mers?”

She frowned. “They’re rioting again. When they heard that MACUSA wanted to dismantle the ward, they went wild. There haven’t been any new deaths, but they did manage to divert the north Bay into the city of Baltimore. There’s flooding all over the city and millions of dollars in damages. They’re refusing to fix it until they have proportional representation in MACUSA.”

“Could be worse,” he said. “You saw how they lived.”

Hermione nodded. “I know.”

“What about the ward?” he asked. “Why did they try to take it down?” 

“The ward is still up,” she said slowly. “Whatever happened when it snapped from you, it tangled everything up. It’s not technically permanent anymore, but MACUSA couldn’t take it down even if they devoted twenty wizards to it a day for the next year. It’s not going anywhere. But it wasn’t MACUSA who tried to take it down. Minister Murdoch sent a team of backstreet curse breakers to do it. He was trying to save face on the international stage. I don’t think he realised what it would do to you, but it doesn’t matter anymore.”

“Why?”

She blinked at him. “Because you’re fine, your magic’s fine, we’re all home—well, Lee’s not—and Murdoch’s been impeached. He’s resigning on Friday. You can thank Narcissa for that. And you can also thank her for getting you cleared of charges with MACUSA and taken off the No Fly List. Her Mr Redfellow was a MACUSA agent working to uncover information that would prove the British Ministry was messing with American affairs. She’d tipped off the Aurors here, and they’d tipped off MACUSA and sent Redfellow to work with her.”

“Merlin,” Harry said. “I was really out of the loop on this.”

“It was like one long Malfoy game,” Hermione agreed. She shrugged. “But I got a little holiday out of it when I most needed it, Lee finally met someone he connects with, and you finally got that chance with Malfoy you’ve been gagging for for years.”

“Hermione—!”

She ignored him. “Plus, we really helped the Mers. Even if it doesn’t seem like we did enough, we did a lot, Harry. They can’t ignore that ward. The beaches are _covered_. It’s all over the news in the Muggle world. They’re showing montages on televisions worldwide. They must act, and it’ll happen soon because people will need time to forget about it before the summer when they plan their holidays. No one wants to remember a beach covered in bags and used syringes. 

“And the oysters,” she went on. “Quincy managed to get us a batch of Pacific oysters, too. Padma and I took them out to Encinitas and San Francisco yesterday. The ones in Chesapeake are already cleaning the water. I've some more samples for you. They’re at Grimmauld Place. I put it back for you and let myself in.

“But the point is, Harry,” she said, finally, “we did enough. You didn’t need to know everything for it to still be a worthwhile experience.”

He frowned, staring down at his hospital sheet. “I suppose not,” he said. “I just hate…” he trailed off.

“Not being in control?” she suggested.

He nodded. “It’s hard.”

“For people like us, I know,” she said. “But this isn’t some book about your life, Harry. Other stories happen that we’re just players in. It’s okay.”

-x-

Draco didn’t actually come to see him until the day St Mungo’s was releasing him. He brought a change of clothes and an unimpressed look. “Still alive? Still able to use a wand?”

“Both,” Harry reported. 

Draco nodded. “Good. You’re being released. I came to collect you. Get dressed.” He tossed the clothes on the bed and leant against the wall, waiting. 

Harry pushed himself out of bed, wobbling only a bit. He wasn’t fully back to himself yet, but he was getting there. He slipped out of his pyjamas and into the trousers Draco had brought him, pulled a fresh shirt over his head (the old Harpies shirt Ginny had given him, not one of his green ones) and slipped on his trainers. Draco shrank his things for him and led him to the Portkey point.

“I could really live with ever Portkeying again, to be honest,” Harry said.

Draco was unimpressed. “Well, you can’t Apparate yet and I’m not Flooing so grab the damned teacup and let’s go.”

Harry grabbed the teacup. But when the Portkey landed, they weren’t standing out front of Grimmauld Place. They were in a room Harry’d never seen before, but he could immediately tell was in Hogwarts. There was light streaming in from windows overlooking the Forbidden Forest, a tidy walnut writing desk, and a couple of cosy chairs around the hearth. A door beside the fireplace led to a polished white loo, and another began a hallway Harry was sure would end in a bedroom.

“Your rooms?” he asked, already knowing the answer.

Draco busied himself taking things from his pockets and setting them in a polished brass bowl by the door. 

“Yes,” he said.

“Not Grimmauld Place,” Harry clarified.

Draco finally turned around, glaring. “Obviously. Do you want to go there?”

“No, no!” Harry said quickly. “I’m just surprised is all.”

He suddenly felt awkward. Draco was still being prickly towards him, and he supposed, if he stretched it, he deserved it. Maybe. Well, Harry could at least see how Draco would think he deserved it. But here they were, back where it all began—at Hogwarts, in Draco’s space. Only this time, it wasn’t his office or his lab. It was his apartment.

“Sit down before you fall down, Potter,” Draco said. “I’ll call for lunch from the kitchens.”

Harry did as he was told. And it was then that he caught a glimpse of neon pink by the window. He whipped his head around, mouth gaping. “You have Seabiscuit? I thought Ron was keeping him.”

“Weasley brought him by the other day. Said he was being pert.”

“He usually is,” Harry agreed. 

Draco continued: “I did make him take back his Chocolate Frog card if he was forcing your deranged pet on me.”

Harry smirked, stood again and walked over to visit Seabiscuit. Seabiscuit peeked out of his castle, saw him, and swam out. He seemed reasonably interested in Harry’s continued wellbeing, but probably had had enough with his life being upheaved so often.

“I should set him free,” Harry said. “I never should’ve kept him to begin with. He just needed to be put with another herd.”

“You people do like to rescue everything even when it’s unnecessary,” Draco commented. Then, to the fireplace: “Kitchens! Send up whatever the staff had today, for two please. Yes, thanks.”

Harry returned to his chair by the fire, pulling his feet up on the cushion so he could wrap his arms around his legs. Draco was still puttering around, trying to look busy. Those people were usually better at being convincing about it. Draco wasn’t at all. Not right now.

“You can look at me, you know,” said Harry.

Draco’s back stiffened; Harry watched the muscles tense. They showed right through his shirt now that he’d removed his travelling robe. Finally, he turned around, quick as a Snitch.

“You stupid, fucking, reckless, cock-sucking, shit-for-brains arsehole!” Draco yelled. “You would’ve died! If you’d been alone in a cell in Guantanamo fucking Bay, or even at the Ministry… if Weasley and I hadn’t been there to coach you through something you should have _already known_ if you were going to fuck about with blood magic, if we’d been three seconds late, if those curse breakers had been three seconds better… you would be a fucking squib or _worse_ right now!”

“I know,” Harry said quietly.

But Draco wasn’t done: “You had _no business_ messing with blood magic, and my mother had _no business_ letting you! She always has some fucking subplot. She probably planned for you to make some huge sacrifice like this for publicity the whole goddamned time, but you didn’t have to go along with it! You didn’t have to _suggest_ it, for Merlin’s sake!”

“I know,” Harry said again.

“ _Why_ are you so stupid sometimes, Potter? I know you’re not _actually_ stupid, so why do you force yourself to do stupid things?”

Harry hesitated, watching Draco watch him. When no answer was immediately forthcoming, Draco deflated, walked over to the fire and sat in the free chair. The flames flared and two trays popped out, settling gently on the side table.

“I just get… anxious,” Harry finally said, frowning at him. “I see something that isn’t working and I need it fixed right away.”

“So your first thought is to tie yourself to a blood ward,” Draco surmised.

Harry shrugged. “I, yeah—” He trailed off, biting his lip. This was tricky ground and he didn’t know how to navigate it. Finally, he sighed. “I didn’t want you to lose something that mattered to you… your crypt magic.”

“Family magic,” Draco inserted.

“Right,” Harry said. “I guess I felt guilty for dragging Lee and Hermione over, and I was angry that you’d been fucked over like me, and it was all going to go to shit because of other arseholes _again_.”

“We could have fought it the right way, Harry,” said Draco. “You know, the way where you don’t irreversibly bind your own magic to another _country_? Well, I suppose you somehow managed to prevent the irreversible part, too. Good job, Wonder Boy. If only you’d just not done it in the first place.”

Harry exhaled heavily. “Draco, I was starting to feel at home there—with you. It felt like a place we could stay and live and I wanted it to be beautiful for you. It was worth the sacrifice at the time. It still is.”

Draco looked pained. “I can’t move to MUS, Harry,” he said. “At least, not now. I like my life. I like teaching. I like being near my mother and a quick Portkey from Pansy and Blaise. If that’s the only place you want me, then…”

“No!” Harry said quickly. Too quickly. “No, that’s not it at all. I mean… I’ve lived here my whole life. I can keep doing it. I just thought it would be… an adventure. We could share.”

Draco didn’t seem convinced. 

“Look, Draco, the thing is… the thing is, I saw something wrong with our lives when Murdoch sent us over there. I figured that if we still couldn’t just live our lives, after thirteen years, then we’d never be able to live them over here. And I wanted to _live_ with you, not just exist. So I needed to fix our lives, and if I can’t fix something, it bothers me so much I can’t be around it.

“I have been in love with you for eight years, Draco. That’s the secret I’ve kept. But that was well before the flood—before I realised it myself and completely lost it for you. Emotions are heavy to hold, especially alone. I couldn’t fix them.”

Draco swallowed. “That’s why you stopped coming around?”

Harry nodded. “Yeah. I was afraid I’d fuck up everything. We had this idyllic little enemy-ship and if I let myself drift a bit, I could imagine that it was real. That we sat and talked in your lab while you worked because it was part of _our_ life, together. Then everything crashed in my head, I knew what I felt… everything was flooded, and I had to escape, or I knew I’d drown.”

“You could’ve saved yourself from drowning,” Draco said. “You saved me from it.”

Harry inhaled sharply. “I did, yeah. But I don’t know that I could’ve saved myself. It’s a lot harder to think when it’s just yourself who needs saving. The inspiration comes when it’s the person you love.”

“In that case,” Draco said carefully, “I would’ve saved you.”

Harry swallowed hard. “You would’ve?”

“Of course, numbnuts,” Draco said. “I loved you then, too.”

Harry blinked several times in quick succession, his brain struggling to comprehend what he’d just heard. And then it did comprehend it, and he launched himself from his chair and into Draco’s lap.

“You love me,” he said, pressing close to Draco’s mouth.

Draco’s hands came up automatically around him and held him there. Harry settled in, nosing against Draco’s cheek. 

“I said I did _then_ ,” Draco said, but Harry could feel his heartbeat beneath his hands and it was fluttering like a Snitch’s wings.

“You still do,” Harry said. “I know you do. I know how you people are.”

“A bit,” Draco admitted. 

Harry inhaled sharply, his heart threatening to laugh with happiness. Instead he kissed Draco, long and slow, and writhed against the feeling of Draco’s arms tightening, of being pulled in. Draco tasted like tea, and it was like he was kissing him for the very first time, because this was the very first time he’d felt allowed to be honest about it. This was the very first time Draco had known Harry loved him, and the other way ‘round, too.

“I’ve missed you,” Harry said, when they pulled apart. 

“I missed you for half a year,” Draco said, annoyance lacing his voice. “You rude shit. How dare you just stop showing up? I’d started charging you for those pH strips at cost!”

Harry laughed and pressed back in for another kiss, and another. “Take me to bed,” he said, between them.

Draco opened his eyes just enough to narrow them. “Only if you promise to stop doing stupid shit, like leaving me and binding your magic to other countries.”

“Deal,” said Harry. “Let’s go.”

He slid off Draco’s lap and took his hand to pull him up. Draco led him down that hallway that did indeed end in a bedroom, and as Harry began to unbutton Draco’s shirtsleeves, he felt the flood come again. Drowning his senses with too much emotion like the Mers had drowned Baltimore. But this was different. Before the flood, you lived in fear. But after the flood, you could begin to build. Harry began to build.


	15. Chapter: Epilogue: Kyle Kringle-Malfoy, Lord of the North Pole

In December, Hogwarts let out for holiday break. Harry was feeling back to normal now, but the prospect of an eight-minute Portkey was threatening to change that. If the Portkey trip didn’t, Draco’s ranting would. At least it wasn’t hurricane season. 

“I can’t believe I’m spending Christmas with Kyle,” he muttered for the third time. “I need a drink.”

“Wait until we get there,” Harry said. “I don’t want you to sick up on me in the middle of the Atlantic.”

Draco sneered, shifting his carry-with bag on his shoulder. Harry had a backpack instead, as he was also carrying a ten-gallon tank of saltwater, pink gravel, and unimpressed seahorse.

“Departure to… New York City… in: forty… five… seconds,” intoned the automated Portkey announcer. 

Draco sighed again, endlessly longsuffering, and took hold of the Nokia mobile phone. It had a Chinese dragon case, which normally would’ve caught at least a bit of Draco’s attention, but not today. Today he was mourning his life without his cousin, whom everyone seemed to like except Draco, who probably did like Kyle at least a bit, but kept up the complaining because it was just one of his better talents.

Harry smiled at Draco across their Portkey, and Draco forgot himself enough to smile back. 

Then the Portkey activated. It was a smoother trip this time, and Harry was only a little unsettled when they landed at the International Portkey Arrivals dais at JFK airport. Despite all the holiday travel, they were able to make good time exiting security and finding the Arrivals pick-up spot.

“Bro! Draco! Over here!” 

“Motherfucker,” Draco said. 

“I think he was calling me bro this time,” Harry said. 

Draco seemed to like this even less. He sneered at Harry and then turned, pasting a smile on his face. “Hello, Kyle.”

Kyle, Quincy, and a small child who looked like a black-haired version of Draco—pointiness and all; that must surely be a Malfoy trait—came over to greet them. Kyle wrapped Draco in a strong, one-armed hug, did the same for Harry with a few extra pats on his back, and then stepped back to let Quincy shake their hands. Draco seemed to like this infinitely more.

“And our daughter, Libertas,” said Kyle. “Libby, for short.”

Libertas stared dourly up at them from beneath straight black hair. “Hello.”

“She’s in her Addams phase,” Kyle assured them. “It sometimes lasts lifetimes, but one never knows.” He shrugged, grinning through his beard. “Anyway! Hermione and Padma arrived this morning, and I think your Mom’s heading down to DC to visit that Redfellow dude for a bit first? She said she’d be here on Christmas Eve. I suppose the others will get here when they get here.”

“Lovely,” said Draco.

“The car’s just this way,” said Quincy. “Let’s get home and get you something to eat.”

There was a black Rolls Royce waiting for them out front, the driver mysteriously hidden by deeply tinted windows. Kyle and Quincy hopped in, Libby following. Harry ducked down and found the inside was magically expanded like a limousine. 

Kyle lived in Manhattan on the Upper East Side, but despite the ferocious traffic between JFK and there, their driver seemed to magically glide through all of it. They pulled into the underground garage ten minutes after leaving the airport. There was a lift up to the Malfoys’ penthouse flat. The whole way up, Libby stared at them, far too sullen for any four-year-old. Draco seemed to feel more at home with her than with Kyle, so Harry left them to their weird bonding.

When Quincy opened the door to their flat, Harry was immediately assaulted with the strangest almost-Christmas smells. It was like pine needles mixed with arsenic and gingerbread mixed with sweet rot.

“Don’t mind the smell,” Kyle said. “Padma and Libby have been brewing poisons together and there was a small explosion last night. I’ve been airing it out, but it’s still lingering.”

Draco looked down at Libby, and for the first time in days, Harry saw the Christmas spirit light up his face. “This smells like Draught of Terrified Death,” he said.

“It was,” Libby replied.

Draco smirked, and there was a new spring in his step as Kyle led them to their bedroom for the duration. When they were alone, Harry set his backpack on the bed and turned to face Draco.

“Well?”

“The American Malfoy line has hope after all,” he decided.

Harry grinned. “Good. Was that actual gingerbread I smelt or part of the poison?”

“Actual gingerbread,” Draco said. “I’m sure you want some.”

“I do, yeah,” said Harry. He held up Seabiscuit’s tank. “Maybe we could grab a couple and then Apparate down to the Lower Bay. Quincy said there’s a herd of magical seahorses there, and the water’s on the mend from her lobsters.”

In his tank, Seabiscuit was giving Draco a pleading look. Harry was going to miss the little bastard, but he rather thought Seabiscuit would be glad to see the back of him.

They met the girls coming in from last-minute holiday shopping as they were leaving. Hermione’s cheeks were flushed red and her hair was springing out of her scarlet hat in a carefree way he hadn’t seen from her in months. Padma came in behind her, a huge smile on her face and dozens of bags in her arms. 

“Harry!” Hermione said, dropping her bags and rushing to him. “You made it! It’s been weeks! I thought you were going back to one of your anti-magic phases when I didn’t see you at the Burrow last weekend.”

“I just didn’t want to be there the first time Ron brought Pansy home,” Harry admitted. Draco elbowed him, and he grunted as all the wind left him. “Lovely though she is.”

“It was… a treasure,” Hermione said, nodding in understanding. “I can see they’ll be very happy together.”

“And so will you,” Harry said quietly. Hermione flushed even more and her eyes cut to the side. Padma was already entertaining Libby with a book on deadly monsters. 

“I think so, yeah,” she said, shrugging, but her smile said it all. “We’ll see how it goes.” She glanced down to Harry’s arms. “Are you going to release Seabiscuit?”

“It’s his early Christmas present.”

She nodded. “I think he’s Jewish, but he looks happier all the same.” She hugged him once more and then went to join Padma and Libby by the Christmas tree.

Draco looked at Harry askance. “Why would she think the seahorse is Jewish?”

Harry shrugged. “Dunno, but she’s the Magical Beings and Creatures expert, so she must be right.” He held up the tank and peered in at Seabiscuit. “Ready to return to the wild, Bikki?”

The Seahorse was quivering in excitement—so much so that he was creating little ripples in the water.

“All right, let’s go.”

He took Draco’s hand and they Apparated to a secluded segment of Marine Park, at the edge of Brooklyn. Harry inconspicuously conjured some wellies and waded in. He was looking for a particular rock formation that Quincy had told him about. Normally, seahorses preferred warmer coasts, but this was a magical herd who’d, supposedly, relocated to New York to start anew. They lived in the salt marshes now, and didn’t seem to mind the cold. 

Finally, he spotted it. He waded in further, careful not to step on anyone, and peered in. There were a dozen or so multicolored seahorses swimming about. Harry carefully lowered the tank so that Seabiscuit could see through the glass.

“Looks good?” he asked.

Seabiscuit did several happy circles.

“Okay, c’mere. Let me take you out.” He reached in and Seabiscuit practically flew into his hand. Harry grasped him gently and transferred him to the marsh. Immediately, the other seahorses swam up to inspect Seabiscuit. They were chattering their mouths and flicking their tails excitedly. 

“Okay down there?” Harry called. 

Seabiscuit turned his head, peering up. The other seahorses followed his gaze. He nodded once. 

“Not too cold?” Harry asked, just to be sure. Seabiscuit shook his head. “Okay. Happy Hanukkah, little guy.

“I hope he’s going to be okay,” Harry said to Draco, who was back on the grass, somehow inspecting his nails through his leather gloves.

“He’ll be fine,” said Draco.

Harry nodded, started to stand and then changed his mind. He reached in and grabbed Seabiscuit’s castle and settled it off to the side in the marsh. Then he reached in again, grabbed some gravel, and sprinkled it around.

“In case he gets homesick,” Harry said. Draco rolled his eyes. 

Finally, there was nothing else Harry could do. He stood up and waded back to shore. Seabiscuit’s tank looked so lonely here. He couldn’t just take it back with him. So he decided to deconstruct it to its base elements and return it to the earth, as he had with the rubbish in the Bay. It was the work of only a few moments, and then there was nothing left to take back. 

He Vanished the wellingtons and put his gloves back on, looping his arm through Draco’s. They stood there, watching the sun fight through the grey December morning. Harry snuggled in closer, and Draco tipped his head to lean against Harry’s.

“What next?” he asked.

“Christmas with my relatives,” Draco said.

Harry laughed. “It’s going to be great. But what about for the wider world? What’s coming next?”

Draco shrugged, wobbling Harry’s head in the process. “The flood,” he said, finally. “When everything changes, and we have a chance to build something new.”

__

The End

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **A/N:  
> **  
>  Sources for Ravenclaws:  
> ● https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1986/06/01/the-poisoning-of-chesapeake-bay/dc70203d-18cf-4287-932b-ca5e5e1b229a/ ← the state of Chesapeake Bay  
> ● https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTuBbuUro4g ← oysters time lapse  
> ● http://twistedsifter.com/2014/10/two-tanks-filled-with-same-water-one-has-oysters/ ← oysters time lapse #2  
> ● http://nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/great-pacific-garbage-patch/ ← island of rubbish
> 
> * * *
> 
> Thank you so much for reading! You can show your appreciation for the author in a comment here or on [Livejournal](http://hd-erised.livejournal.com/78520.html) . ♥
> 
> This story is part of an on-going anonymous fest hosted at hd_erised @ livejournal.com. The author will be revealed January 9th.


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